“You’ve been watching me, you fiend, you! Dogging me—haunting me! I’ll have no more o’t! I’m not to be bribed or threatened or coaxed any more; least of all thieved from. Where is it?”
“You aren’t, aren’t you?” screeched the doctor. “You leave me here and I fall asleep. You’re away and you come storming back that I’ve robbed you. It’s a trap, by thunder, but you won’t catch me in it!”
“I believe you’re lying!” cried my father. His voice seemed strained with passion. But the other answered him now much more coolly.
“Believe what you like, my friend. It’s beneath my dignity to contradict you again; but take this for certain—if you slander me in public, I’ll ruin you!”
Then silence fell and I waited to hear no more. I stole to my room and crept to bed. I had never changed my drenched clothes and the deadly chill of my limbs was beginning to overcome the frost in my heart.
It seemed hours before the horrible coldness relaxed, and then straightway a parching fever scorched me as if I lay against a furnace. I heard sounds and dull footsteps and the ghostly creaking of stairs, but did not know if they were real or only incidents in my half-delirium.
At last as day was breaking I fell into a heavy, exhausted sleep. It merged into a dream of my younger brother. We walked together as we had done as little children, my arm around his neck. “Zenny,” he said, like a baby paraphrasing Zyp’s words, “what’s ’ove dat ’ey talk about?” I could have told him in the gushing of my heart, but in a moment he ran from me and faded.
I gave a cry and woke, and Jason was standing over me, with a white, scared face.
“Get up!” he whispered; “Modred’s dead!”