Presently the surgeon who was sitting up with Desmond appeared, looking worried.

His countenance brightened at sight of Elizabeth, with whom he had already had much practical consultation.
'Could you persuade Mr.Mannering to go to bed ?' Elizabeth rose with some hesitation and followed him into the library.

The great room, once so familiar, now so strange, the nurses in their white uniforms, moving silently, one standing by the bed, watch in hand--Major Mannering on the farther side, motionless--the smell of antiseptics, the table by the bed with all its paraphernalia of bandages, cups, glasses, medicine bottles--the stillness of brooding death which held it all--seemed to dash from her any last, blind, unreasonable hope that she might have cherished.
The Squire standing by the fire, where he had been opposing a silent but impatient opposition to the attempt of doctor and nurses to make him take some rest, saw Elizabeth enter.

His eyes clung to her as she approached him.

So she _was_ near him--and he was not cut off from her.
Then the surgeon watched with astonishment the sudden docility of a man who had already seemed to him one of the most unmanageable of persons.