"You must not talk any more," she said. "It excites you! Your temperature is rising."
He ignored her altogether.
"Listen," he said to me, "why they have let you come here I cannot tell!
You know that I am in prison—that I am not likely to leave here alive!"
"I don't think that it is so bad as that," I assured him.
"It is worse! I am likely to die without the chance of finishing—my work. Great things will die with me. God knows what will happen."
"You have a doctor and a hospital nurse," I remarked. "That doesn't look as though they meant you to die!"
"You don't know who I am, and you don't know who they are," he answered, dropping his voice almost to a whisper.
"I want a month, one more month, and I might cheat them yet!"
"I don't think that they mean you to die," I said. "They have an idea that you are in possession of some marvellous secret. They want to get possession of that first."
"They persevere," he murmured. "In Paris—but never mind. They know very well that that secret, if I die before I can finish my work, dies with me, or—"