's not going to--here, listen!
Take your hands away. Listen!--_Listen!_ I can go to the house and send
Uncle Jefferson for the doctor and he--No! stop, I say! Oh--I'm sorry if
I hurt you. How strong you are!"

"Let me!"

"No! Your lips are not for that--good God, that damnable thing! You
yourself might be--"

"Let me! Oh, how cruel you are! It was my fault. But for me it would
never have--"

"No! I would rather--"

"_Let me!_ Oh, if you _died_!"

With all the force of her strong young body she wrenched away his
protestant hands. A thirst and a sickish feeling were upon him, a
curious irresponsible giddiness, and her hair which that struggle had
brought in tumbled masses about her shoulders, seemed to have little
flames running all over it. His foot had entirely lost its feeling.
There was a strange weakness in his limbs.

He felt it with a cool thriving surprise. Could it be death stealing
over him--really death, in this silly inglorious guise, from a miserable
crawling reptile? Death, when he had just begun a life that seemed so
worth living?

A sense of unreality came. He was asleep! The failure, the
investigation, Virginia--all was a dream. Presently he would wake in his
bachelor quarters to find his man setting out his coffee and grapefruit.
He settled back and closed his eyes.

Moments of half-consciousness, or consciousness jumbled with strange
imaginings, followed. At times he felt the pressure upon the wounded
foot, was sensible of the suction of the young mouth striving
desperately to draw the poison from the wound. From time to time he was
conscious of a white desperate face haloed with hair that was a mist of
woven sparkles. At times he thought himself a recumbent stone statue in
a wood, and her a great tall golden-headed flower lying broken at his
feet. Again he was a granite boulder and she a vine with yellow leaves
winding and clinging about him. Then a blank--a sense of movement and
of troublous disturbance, of insistent voices that called to him and
inquisitive hands that plucked at him, and then voices growing distant
again, and hands falling away, and at last--silence.

CHAPTER XXI

AFTER THE STORM

Inky clouds were gathering over the sunlight when Shirley came from
Damory Court, along the narrow wood-path under the hemlocks, and the way
was striped with blue-black shadows and filled with sighing noises. She
walked warily, halting often at some leafy rustle to catch a quick
br