"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good, you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent, watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and we've got to take them standing."
She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least. Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it was all a dream, I should believe you."
"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw you."
"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard, but I can't help it."
"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."
"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she replied almost bitterly.
After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of criticism.
A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased.
"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with passionate earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my husband left me for another woman."
"The one in there?"