A fierce gust of wind rattled the window, and Birdie cried out in terror.
"You stop being afraid and go to sleep," urged Dan, but she shook her head.
"I don't dare to! You'd go away, and I'd wake up and go crazy with fear. I always was like that even when I was a kid, back home. I used to pretty near die of nights when pa would come in drunk and get to breaking up things. There was a man like that down where I been staying. He'd fall against my door 'most every night. Sometimes I'd meet him out in the street, and he'd follow me for squares."
Dan drew the blanket about her shoulders.
"Go to sleep," he said. "I won't leave you."
"Yes; but to-morrow night, and next night! Oh, God! I'm smothering.
Lift me up!"
He sat on the side of the bed and lifted her until she rested against his shoulder. A deathly pallor had spread over her features, and she clung to him weakly.
Through the long hours of the stormy night he sat there, soothing and comforting her, as he would have soothed a terror-stricken child. By and by her clinging hands grew passive in his, her rigid, jerking limbs relaxed, and she fell into a feverish sleep broken by fitful sobs and smothered outcries. As Dan sat there, with her helpless weight against him, and gently stroked the wet black hair from her brow, something fierce and protective stirred in him, the quick instinct of the chivalrous strong to defend the weak. Here was somebody more wretched, more desolate, more utterly lonely than himself—a soft, fearful, feminine somebody, ill-fitted to fight the world with those frail, white hands.
Hitherto he had blindly worshiped at one shrine, and now the image was shattered, the shrine was empty—so appallingly empty that he was ready to fill it at any cost. For the first time in three days he ceased to think of Nance Molloy or of Mac Clarke, whose burden he was all unconsciously bearing. He ceased, also, to think of the soul he had been trying so earnestly to save. He thought instead of the tender weight against his shoulder, of the heavy lashes that lay on the tear-stained cheeks so close to his, of the soft, white brow under his rough, brown fingers. Something older than love or religion was making its claim on Dan.