It took his drugged mind three whole days to grasp its new realities. He had been wounded, badly wounded. (How, he could not yet remember.) His left thigh-bone was shattered; his right foot badly smashed. The thing above him—which made the bed seem like a four-poster—was a “super-structure”: a frame-work with a pulley arrangement whereby his left leg, a mass of bandages, could be hauled up and down for dressing. Both left leg and right foot were “septic”: in the wounds, had been inserted indiarubber-tubing—Carrel-Dakin tubes—to drain them. The changing of these tubes caused him constant pain. The screens round his bed prevented him from seeing the other patients in the ward. But he knew them to be many; and, lying awake at night, he could hear the orderlies shuffling round in their list slippers: their “Are you awake, sir?” sounded an unceasing chorus to his dreams. For the alert clean-shaven doctor had only reduced, not stopped, the morphia: and Francis had many dreams. They came as the morphia-wave surged over him in comfortable pain-killing warmth; receded as the wave ebbed, leaving him prey to suffering. And always, in his dreams, he saw Beatrice, a gracious figure vignetted in silver radiance against the background of his thought. It seemed as though her spirit watched over him, tender, infinitely solicitous. . . . He had been in hospital eight days before it was borne in on his dazed intellect that he must write to her. They fought him, sisters and doctor, for three weary hours. “He was too ill to write letters,” said the doctor. “Let me write for you,” begged Sister Prothero. But Francis insisted. They could neither persuade nor coerce him. He would write a letter; write it with his own hand. Lying there, feverish, broken, not even certain of the exact words his lips uttered, he forced them to his will. At last, they yielded—for they knew his chance of life still hung by a hair: and an orderly brought him paper, an envelope, an indelible pencil. The sister propped him with pillows. As she lifted him, he felt his head turning, spinning. . . . Yet he wrote, tracing each word with pain. A letter of lies, of glorious lies. He was in hospital, wounded—only slightly wounded, she must understand—in a few days, he would be about again—would write her a long letter—meanwhile, he sent his “very kind regards.” He folded the sheet himself; put it in the envelope; wrote the address; signed in the left-hand bottom corner. . . . Then he fainted; and, for a week, doctor and sisters blamed themselves for their yielding, fearful lest the man should die.