When she looked again, an elderly, broad-figured man with a florid face was standing close beside the bed, gazing with anxiety upon her. She knew that it was General Boyce, and for a long time was not surprised that he should be there. The capacity for wondering, for thinking about things, seemed not to exist in her brain. She looked at him calmly and did not dream of speaking. “Are you better?” she heard him eagerly whisper. “Are you in pain?” The complex difficulty of two questions which required separate answers troubled her remotely. She made some faint nodding motion of her head and eyes, and then lay perfectly still again. She could hear the sound of her own breathing--a hoarse, sighing sound, as if of blowing through a comb--and, now that it was suggested to her, there was a deadened heavy ache in her breast. Still placidly surveying the General, she began to be conscious of remembering things. The pictures came slowly, taking form with a fantastic absence of consecutive meaning, but they gradually produced the effect of a recollection upon her mind. The starting point--and everything else that went before that terrible sinking, despairing struggle through the wet snow--was missing. She recalled most vividly of all being seized with a sudden crisis of swimming giddiness and choking--her throat and chest all afire with the tortures of suffocation. It was under a lamp-post, she remembered; and when the vehement coughing was over, her mouth was full of blood, and there were terrifying crimson spatters on the snow. She had stood aghast at this, and then fallen to weeping piteously to herself with fright. How strange it was--in the anguish of that moment she had moaned out, “O mother, mother!” and yet she had never seen that parent, and had scarcely thought of her memory even for many, many years. Then she had blindly staggered on, sinking more than once from sheer exhaustion, but still forcing herself forward, her wet feet weighing like leaden balls, and fierce agonies clutching her very heart. She had fallen in the snow at the very end of her journey; had dragged herself laboriously, painfully, up on to the steps, and had beaten feebly on the panels of the door with her numbed hands, making an inarticulate moan which not all her desperate last effort could lift into a cry; and then there had come, with a great downward swoop of skies and storm, utter blackness and collapse. She closed her eyes now in the weariness which this effort at recollection had caused. Her senses wandered off, unbidden, unguided, to a dream of the buzzing of a bee upon a window-pane, which was somehow like the stertorous sound of her own breathing.