It'll be along in five minutes."

"Mark," Edith said, paying no attention. "My husband! Is he all right?"

"Now lady, please. He's being taken care of. You—"

But she was not listening. Holding to his arm she pulled herself to a sitting position. She saw their car on its side some yards away, other cars pulled up around them, a little knot of staring people. Saw them and dismissed them. Her gaze found her husband, lying on the ground a few feet away, a coat folded beneath his head.

Mark was dead. She had been a doctor's wife for twenty years, and before that a nurse. She knew death when she saw it.

"Mark." The word was spoken to herself, but the Trooper took it for a question.

"Yes, lady," he said. "He's dead. He was still breathing when I got here, but he died two, three minutes ago."

She got to her knees. Her only thought was to reach his side. She scrambled across the few feet of ground to him still on her knees and crouched beside him, fumbling for his pulse. There was none. There was nothing. Just a man who had been alive and now was dead.

Behind her she heard a voice raised. She turned. A large, disheveled man was standing beside the Trooper, talking loudly.

"Now listen, officer," he was saying, "I'm telling you again, it wasn't my fault. The guy pulled sharp left right in front of me. Not a thing I could do. It's a wonder we weren't all three of us killed. You can see by the marks on their car it wasn't my fault—"

Edith Williams closed her mind to the voice. She let Mark's hand lie in her lap as she fumbled in her bag, which was somehow still clutched in her fingers. She groped for a handkerchief to stem the tears which would not be held back. Something was in the way—something smooth and hard and cold. She drew it out and heard the thin, sweet tinkle of the crystal bell. She must have dropped it automatically into her bag as they were preparing to leave the house.

The hand in her lap moved. She gasped and bent forward as her husband's eyes opened.

"Mark!" she whispered. "Mark, darling!"

"Edith," Mark Williams said with an effort. "Sorry—damned careless of me. Thinking of the hospital...."

"You're alive!" she said. "You're alive! 

 Prev. P 6/11 next