“Pray?” echoed Caleb, rousing himself and clutching at the faint hope. “It can’t do any harm. Pray, man! Pray!”
“I—I can’t!” babbled the boy. “I don’t know how. I never prayed in my life. I—”
“Try it!” groaned Caleb. “Try it, I say! You may have beginner’s luck!”
“No use!” interposed the doctor. “It’s over.”
As he spoke, Desirée stirred ever so slightly. Her closed eyes opened. She seemed to settle lower in the bed. Then she lay very still.
With a sobbing cry Jack Hawarden rushed from the room. Conover stood, dumb, petrified, staring wildly down into the unseeing, all-seeing eyes.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE LAST FIGHT
Under the concentrated anguish of Conover’s gaze the girl’s long lashes seemed to flicker ever so slightly. Through the Gethsemane of the moment the impossible fancy that she lived pierced Caleb’s numbed brain; tearing away the apathy that was closing over him. All at once he was again the Fighter,—the man who could not know defeat.
“She is alive!” he persisted as the physician turned from the bed. “Look! She—”
Dr. Bond’s bearded lip curled in a sad derision that woke Caleb’s smouldering antagonism into flame. With a sudden insane impulse the Fighter knelt on the edge of the bed and caught up the pitifully still little hands.