“Oh, no,” said Manners.
“Make me think that,” said Aladdin, with a quaver. “Please make me think that if you can, for, God help me, I think I would have let you freeze.”
“When I found you,” said Manners, “I—I was sorry that the Lord hadn’t sent somebody else to you, and me to somebody else. That was because you always hated me with no very good reason, and a man hates to be hated, and so, to be quite honest, I hated you back.”
“Right,” said Aladdin, “right.”
Light began to come in through the windows, whose broken panes Manners had stopped with crumpled wall-paper.
“But when I got you here,” said Manners, “and began to work over you, you stopped being Aladdin O’Brien, and were just a man in trouble.”
“Yes,” said Aladdin, “it must be like that. It’s got to be like that.”
“At first,” said Manners, “I worked because it seemed the proper thing to do, and then I got interested, and then it became terrible to think that you might die.”
“Yes,” said Aladdin. His face was ghastly in the pre-sunrise light.
“You wouldn’t get warm for hours,” said Manners, “and I got so tired that I couldn’t rub any more, and so I stripped and got into the blankets with you, and tried to keep you as warm as I could that way.”