"Madame le Blank! ye know! Got cut about the head down at the fete
at South Park! Tried to dance upon the table, and rolled over on some
champagne bottles. See? Wants plastering up!"

"Ah brute! Hog! Nozzing of ze kine! Why will you lie? I dance! Ze
cowards, fools, traitors zere upset ze table and I fall. I am cut! Ah,
my God, how I am cut!"

She stopped suddenly and lapsed heavily against the counter. At which
Kane hurried around to support her into the surgery with the one
fixed idea in his bewildered mind of getting her out of the shop,
and, suggestively, into the domain and under the responsibility of his
partner. The hackman, apparently relieved and washing his hands of any
further complicity in the matter, nodded and smiled, and saying, "I
reckon I'll wait outside, pardner," retreated incontinently to his
vehicle. To add to Kane's half-ludicrous embarrassment the fair
patient herself slightly resisted his support, accused the hackman of
"abandoning her," and demanded if Kane knew "zee reason of zees affair,"
yet she presently lapsed again into the large reclining-chair which
he had wheeled forward, with open mouth, half-shut eyes, and a strange
Pierrette mask of face, combined of the pallor of faintness and chalk,
and the rouge of paint and blood. At which Kane's cautiousness again
embarrassed him. A little brandy from the bottle labeled "Vini Galli"
seemed to be indicated, but his inexperience could not determine if her
relaxation was from bloodlessness or the reacting depression of alcohol.
In this dilemma he chose a medium course, with aromatic spirits of
ammonia, and mixing a diluted quantity in a measuring-glass, poured
it between her white lips. A start, a struggle, a cough--a volley
of imprecatory French, and the knocking of the glass from his
hand followed--but she came to! He quickly sponged her head of the
half-coagulated blood, and removed a few fragments of glass from a long
laceration of the scalp. The shock of the cold water and the appearance
of the ensanguined basin frightened her into a momentary passivity. But
when Kane found it necessary to cut her hair in the region of the wound
in order to apply the adhesive plaster, she again endeavored to rise and
grasp the scissors.

"You'll bleed to death if you're not quiet," said the young man with
dogged gravity.

Something in his manner impressed her into silence again. He cut whole
locks away ruthlessly; he was determined to draw the edges of th