"Will you try again, in a few minutes, Miss Carroll?" he asked, ignoring Dr. Mac, and the little hurt, despairing sound which I couldn't help making.
"I can't!" I said flatly.
He spread out his hands in an entirely foreign gesture of defeat.
"Of course, if you prefer not...." he suggested sketchily.
There was something so positively scornful in the look he bent on me that I writhed. I made my two eyes as much like swords as possible—I hope, Diary, that they were not crossed!—and snapped, "Do you mean to imply...?"
Suddenly I stopped. I was looking straight into the steel-blue eyes, and it was not until I saw their frosty expression change to something distinctly like triumph that I discovered that—I was sitting up!
Actually! But only for the fraction of a minute. It was the discovery itself, I think, that laid me flat again, with Dr. Mac's arm around me, and his disengaged hand stretched across the bed, frantically shaking Dr. Denton's.
"Laddie, 'tis mar-r-vellous!" he was saying, with a remarkable rolling of his r's.
But Dr. Denton was looking at me.
"You see," he said quietly, "that after all you can do it. It is only a matter of patience, and the will to conquer. And perhaps a certain amount of—impetus."