Tuke nodded.
“Hush!” he murmured again. “He hears, I think.”
Betty knelt pitifully beside the sufferer. Her breath was like balm on his poor battered face. His eyes turned to her with a pathetic gratitude that was moving in the extreme. They heard him murmuring to her, thickly and brokenly.
“She hath been an angel to his torments,” whispered Sir David. “All the long night she hath never ceased to care for him, and he follows her with his eyes till the tears of both make a veil between. She can read his least desire, as——”
Betty turned her head and looked up.
“He is speaking. He wants you to listen.”
Both men stooped to catch the muttered words.
“It is found. I knew before you spoke. I knew its discovery at the last would find me here—here, on the ground. The curse of the predestined is unfulfilment. Let me look at the wicked talisman that is soaked in the blood of martyrs. Let me look, I say.”
Tuke leaned over and placed the infernal pebble, splotched and overlaid as he had recovered it, in the groping hand. The fingers closed convulsively on it. The eyes of the dying were fixed questioning.
“You would have me say how it came to light?”