Again there was an interval of speechlessness, and then the hushed voice of the young woman sitting with her hands locked over her knees.
“Did my father know of that prospecting?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Poor father!” she said, and her voice was shaken. “He is just simply stone blind on that side, David. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t make him see! And now—he is going—to pay—the highest price he knows—for the dreadful cure!”
“It is time for you to forget for a while, if you can,” said David, not knowing what else to say; and he went aside with Regnier, blowing out the light of the precious candle-end to save it for a time of greater need.
A little later, when he came back and struck a match, he found her sleeping with her face hidden in the crook of an arm, and he was glad.
XXVII
The Terror
WHEN Virginia opened her eyes, after a troubled sleep which seemed to her to have lasted only a few moments, it was with a start, and out of the depths of a nightmare in which she had dreamed that some one was smothering her.
“David!” she called softly; and he answered at once out of the enveloping darkness.
“I am here—sitting beside you. Have you had a good sleep?”