"Folks that has snakes likes their bes' friends around 'em," declared the bartender stubbornly. "They has influence——"
"Get out," reiterated Dr. Harpe curtly, and he finally went with the rest.
"I'll give him a hypodermic," she said when the room was cleared, and hastened back to her office for the needle.
Together they watched the morphine do its work and sat in silence while the wrecked and jangling nerves relaxed and sleep came to the unregenerate Dago Duke.
Dr. Harpe's impassive face gave no indication of the activity of her mind. Now that the opportunity to "square herself," to use her own words, had arrived, she had no notion of letting it pass.
"He seems in a bad way," Van Lennop said at last in a formal tone.
"It had to come—the clip he was going," she replied, seating herself on the edge of the bed and wiping the moisture from his forehead with the corner of the sheet.
The action was womanly, she herself looked softer, more womanly, than she had appeared to Van Lennop, yet he felt no relenting and wondered at himself.
She ended another silence by turning to him suddenly and asking with something of a child's blunt candor——
"You don't like me, do you?"