“Never since I was a little runt—did I—never cried in thirty years—and here I am-leaking like a pail!” Thus spoke John Sibley in gasps and squeezing Kitty’s hand all the time unconsciously, but spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to hold it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though far from precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her that; but if she had understanding she would realise after to-night what he had in his mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of his very vital palm, had her turn at explanation. “I wouldn’t have broke down myself—it was all your fault,” she said. “I saw it—yes—in your face as we left the house. I’m so glad it’s over safe—no one belonging to him here, and not knowing if he’d wake up alive or not—I just was swamped.”
He took up the misty excuse and explanation. “I had a feeling for him from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil—it’s what does a man good! And going bung over a horserace—that’s what got me too, where I was young and tender. Swatted that Burlingame every time—one eye, two eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened—called him an ‘outrageous lawyer’—my, that last clip was a good one! You bet he’s a sport—Crozier.”
Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes. “He made the judge smile—I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap. You couldn’t have believed it, if you hadn’t seen it—
“Here, let go my hand,” she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.
It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken her hand—that he had taken her hand. She was conscious in a nice, sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the abstraction of her emotion.
“Oh, here, let it go quick!” she added—“and not because mother’s coming, either,” she added as the door opened and her mother came out—not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man in the moonlight at ten o’clock at night, but—good, practical soul—to bring them each a cup of beef-tea.
“Here, you two,” she said as she hurried to them. “You need something after that business in there, and there isn’t time to get supper ready. It’s as good for you as supper, anyway. I don’t believe in underfeeding. Nothing’s too good to swallow.”
She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.
“And when you’ve drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty,” she added presently. “You’ve had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but there’s always a reaction, and you’ll pay for it. It wasn’t fit work for a girl of your age; but I’m proud of your nerve, and I’m glad you showed the Young Doctor what you can do. You’ve got your father’s brains and my grit,” she added with a sigh of satisfaction. “Come along—bed now, Kitty. If you get too tired you’ll have bad dreams.”
Perhaps she was too tired. In any case she had dreams. Just as the great surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so Kitty Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights afterwards, saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the basin, disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man of men in her eyes, and saw the wound stitched up—the last act of the business before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, “You’ll do wherever you’re put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan. You’re a great girl. And now get some fresh air and forget all about it.”