impulse of which, if it were his at all, he was surely
not conscious.

As he reached her side, she laid a hand on him, and, "Dick!" she cried
again.

The man started, turning his face the wrong way.

The eyes did not open, but the jaw muscles relaxed, letting the cold
pipe fall from his teeth. The blind effort which he made to catch it
overbalanced the automaton.

He pitched forward, and would have fallen on his face, but for the
shoulder which stopped his head, and the arms that clutched his reeling
body.

Accurate instinct loosened her joints as the weight struck her, and she
came slowly to her knees, sinking back until she sat upon her heels, so
that the man received no shock. She had turned halfside-ways as she went
down; and kneeling, held him across her, with the uninjured cheek
strained upon her left shoulder, and his heels far away to her right.

She looked down into the face, where the eyes were now wholly covered.

The dark semi-circles under the closed lids and the deepened lines of
the thin face moved in her compassion as tender as she felt for the
bleeding bruise on the cheek. She remembered how he had nursed her, and
given her, by his mere sympathy and control, that hour's wonderful
sleep. She remembered him crawling, at the acme of her terror, through
the slit of the window; saving her from the Dutch woman; turning his
back while she dressed; leaping like a heaven-sent devil over the
stair-rail; fighting Ockley with his fists--and refused to remember that
same enemy brought utterly to an end of his enmity.

Her heart swelled, and beat heavily with the sense of ownership and the
dread of losing what was her own; it was a fear more poignant than any
other of the fears which she had suffered in a long chain since she fell
asleep in Randal Bellamy's study--only last night!

Was it death--death which she had seen once already to-day--was it that
coming to her here against her heart? Or was it but with him as it had
been with her in the Brundage bedroom--the awful need of sleep.

She bent her ear close over his lips, and heard the breath long, and
regular.

She forgot his wasted features in the beauty of the long eyelashes
touching his cheeks; and just because she could not see what the lids
were hiding, she remembered her walk down through the wood below the
Manor House, and that foolish phrase, "blue as a hummin-bird's weskit,"
which had then haunted her, till she found him playing with Gorgon i