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Mahon slept and Cadet Lowe immediately slept.

‘I want to talk to you, Joe. About him,’ she added quickly, feeling Gilligan’s stare. ‘Can you listen or had you rather go to bed and talk it over in the morning?’

Gilligan, focusing his eyes, answered:

‘Why, now suits me. Always oblige a lady.’

Making her decision suddenly she said:

‘Come in my room then.’

‘Sure: lemme get my bottle and I’m your man.’

She returned to her room while he sought his bottle and when he joined her she was sitting on her bed, clasping her knees, wrapped in a blanket Gilligan drew up a chair.

‘Joe, do you know he’s going blind?’ she said abruptly.

After a time her face became a human face and holding it in his vision he said:

‘I know more than that. He’s going to die.’

‘Die?’

‘Yes, ma’am. If I ever seen death in a man’s face, it’s in his. Goddam this world,’ he burst out suddenly.

‘Shhh!’ she whispered.

‘That’s right, I forgot,’ he said swiftly.

She clasped her knees, huddled beneath the blanket, changing the position of her body as it became cramped, feeling the wooden head board of the bed, wondering why there were not iron beds, wondering why everything was as it was—iron beds, why you deliberately took certain people to break your intimacy, why these people died, why you yet took others.... Will my death be like this: fretting and exasperating? Am I cold by nature, or have I spent all my emotional coppers, that I don’t seem to feel things like others? Dick, Dick. Ugly and dead.