He slipped his arm under the pillow, and lifted her. She commanded herself and drank from the medicine-glass he held to her lips. "What queer stuff!" she said. "Is it--is it 'the pain-killer'?" "What do you know about 'the pain-killer'?" he said. She shrank a little at the question, and he did not pursue it. He laid her down again, settled the pillows, and left her. Olga lay very still. She felt as if a strange glow were dawning in her brain, a kind of mental radiance, inexpressibly wonderful, absorbing her pain as mist is absorbed by the sun. Gradually it grew and spread till the pain was all gone, swamped, forgotten, in this curious flood of warmth and ecstasy. It was the most marvellous sensation she had ever experienced. Her whole being thrilled responsive to the glow. It was as though a door had been opened somewhere above her and she were being drawn upwards by some invisible means, upwards and upwards, light as gossamer and strangely transcendentally happy, towards the warmth and brightness and wonder that lay beyond. Up and still up her spirit seemed to soar. Of her body she was supremely, most blissfully, unconscious. She felt as one at the entrance of a dream-world, a world of unknown unimagined splendours, a world of golden atmosphere, of ineffable rapture, and she was floating up through the ether, eager-spirited, wrapt in delight. And then quite suddenly she knew that Max had returned to her side. His hand was laid upon her arm, his fingers sensitive and ruthless closed upon her pulse. In that instant Olga also knew that her dream-world was fading from her, her paradise was lost. Softly, inexorably, the door that had begun to open to her closed. The hand that grasped her drew her firmly back to earth and held her there. In her disappointment she could have wept, so vital, so entrancing, had been the vision. Piteously she tried to plead with him, but it was as though an obscuring veil had been dropped upon her. She could only utter unintelligible murmurings. She sought for words and found them not. And then she heard his voice quite close to her, very tender and reassuring. "Don't vex yourself, sweetheart! It's all right--all right." His hand smoothed her brow; she almost fancied that he kissed her hair, but she was not certain and it did not seem to matter. Surely nothing could ever matter again since the closing of that door! A brief confusion was hers, a brief wandering in dark places, and then a slow deepening of the dark, the spreading of a great silence.... The last thing she heard was the steady ticking of a watch that someone held close to her. The last thing her brain registered was the close, unvarying grip of a hand upon her wrist....