Very gradually she began to remember what had happened to her. She glanced at her wounded hand, swathed in bandages and resting upon a cushion. Who had arranged it so, she wondered? How had it been done without her waking?
At the back of her mind hovered the answers to both these questions, but she could not bring herself to face them—not yet. She was loth to withdraw herself from the haze of sleep that still hung about her. She shrank intuitively from a full awakening.
And then, while she still loitered on the way to consciousness, there came a soft movement near her, and in a moment all her repose was shattered.
Pierre, his dark face grimly inscrutable, bent over her with a cup of something steaming in his hand.
She shrank at the sight of him. Her whole body seemed to contract. Involuntarily almost she shut her eyes. Her heart leapt and palpitated within her like a chained thing seeking to escape.
Then suddenly it stood still. He was speaking.
"Mademoiselle Stephanie," he said, "I beg you will not agitate yourself. You have no cause for agitation. It is not by my own wish that I intrude upon you. I have no choice."
It was curtly uttered. It sounded rigidly uncompromising. Yet, for some reason wholly inexplicable to herself, she was conscious of relief. She opened her eyes, though she did not dare to raise them.
"How is that, monsieur?" she said faintly.
He was silent for a moment; then: