A silence had fallen upon Westenra and his companion, one of those silences that have lips to speak and hands to caress. A little wind blew past them carrying a snatch of her hair across his lips. He had never before felt a woman's hair on his lips! Her pale hand nervous and lonely lay outside the rug in which she was wrapped.
"That hand looks cold lying there," he said, and taking it drew it under a fold of his own rug, and held it fast. It lay in his without response like a little stone hand, but through his palm he could feel her pulse beating wild and uncertain, and that stirred him strangely, yet awoke the doctor in him too. He remembered the brandy-and-soda she had drunk the first evening, and every evening since. He remembered too his own cynical thought, and repeated it now, though his voice held little cynicism.
"I 'll give you two years longer to live if you keep on at this rate."
"What rate?" she asked in surprise.
"Drinking, smoking, taking drugs. What drug is it you take?"
"You seem to know all my vices," she said laughing a little tremulously. She was leaning back in her chair looking very pale. "I have to take veronal sometimes to make me sleep."
"You would sleep naturally if you gave up smoking and drinking, and lived a quiet natural life."
"But then I could n't write."
"Well, you must give up writing."
"But then I could n't live," she said laughing. "You don't seem to know that I write for my living--it is my work."