“One of the brutes nearly chewed my arm off,” he told her. “If the other omitted to eat me entirely, it was not because he did not try. I did for them, though,” he added, and smiled as he said it. After the manner of man, he took comfort in the feat.
“But not for the worst brute,” Leilah answered wishing in spite of herself, wishing instinctively and even ungrammatically that some good fate might.
From beneath a bandage, Verplank laughed:
“Bah! I’ll do for him, too.”
But Leilah did not hear. She was speaking to the surgeon, whom—with a bravery which in itself was a little defiant, and which in any event might have been more discreet—thereafter, daily and openly, she supplied with that which every surgeon wants, a nurse obedient, attentive, skilful, alert, and who, in addition ministers for love.
Presently, Verplank was able to be up. The surgeon said that in a day he would be able to be out. Verplank, who knew as much without being told, asked Leilah to go with him on the morrow.
Leilah refused. Verplank, for an invalid, became then surprisingly demoniac. The demonism of him affected her less than a conception, feminine perhaps but erroneous, of her own selfishness. If she went, she knew beforehand that irremissibly she would be dishonoured. But she knew also that any sense of dishonour must, if it is to ashame, come not from without but from within. If she went, her conscience, she thought, would acquit her. She thought that she would not feel dishonoured, though she knew that she would be disgraced. To refuse on that account seemed to her selfish. As a result finally she consented. Yet in consenting she made one stipulation. Characteristic in itself, it was that there must be nothing clandestine, that he must come for her in the rue de la Pompe, and that from there, her boxes put on whatever vehicle he brought, they would leave for darkness by daylight.
The plan pleased Verplank. He agreed at once. He told her that he would come the next day.
When he had, she added: “To-night I go to the Opéra; the Helley-Quetgens have asked me. It is my last look at this world.”
Then, shortly, the arrangements for the evasion completed, she left the hotel.