been wounded. "Do you remember this?" she asked him. "There is blood
upon it, but that is going to be wiped out."

He looked at her with eyes from which the consciousness was dying, and
did not struggle any more.

"Do you remember it?" she asked again. "You had cut your name and mine
on a tree in the garden of my home, and you asked for the penknife as a
memento. Is it possible you can have forgotten?"

She spoke to him with great deliberation, holding the penknife before
his eyes, and watching the drooping of the heavy lids.

"Strange, isn't it, that, so much having been flung away, you should
have kept this miserable little keepsake with you till to-day? I
suppose its small blade is its sharp blade still?"

Slowly she opened it, and stood up.

With an effort he opened his eyes upon her. "I am dead with sleep," he
said, in a hollow, far-away voice; "but I can't sleep with my hands
tied. Set me free, Marion! Set me free!"

"It is that I am going to do," she said.

She leant above him then, and, with fingers that never trembled,
unbuttoned the wrists of his flannel shirt and rolled the sleeves back
to his shoulders. How thin the arms were; how plainly the veins showed
up in the white, moist skin. Across one that rose like a fine blue cord
from the bend of the arm she drew the sharp blade of the knife. He gave
but the slightest start, so heavy was he with sleep. She knelt upon his
pillow, leant across him, and in the other arm severed the
corresponding vein.

She had thought that the blood would flow quietly--how it spurted and
spouted and ran! Before she could untie his hands and lay them beneath
the blanket at his sides the white, lean arms were crimson with blood.
At this rate, it would not take him long to die! She rinsed the blood
from the little penknife in a basin of water, and turning down the
blanket, laid it upon his breast.

"You have kept it a good many years," she said, mockingly. "Keep it
still."

Some blood was on her own hands--how could she have been so clumsy!
They were all smeared with blood; they--horrible!--_smelt_ of blood.

She flew towards the basin to rinse them, but before she could reach
it, without a warning sound the door opened, and the matron was in the
room.

With the tell-tale hands behind her back, Sister Marion stood before
her, intervening between her and the bed.

"Your patient is strangely quiet all at once," the matron said.

"He is sleeping," said the nurse.