“I won’t. No, stop! How do you know? It’s not going to—here, listen! Take your hands away. Listen!—Listen! I can go to the house and send Uncle Jefferson for the doctor and he—No! stop, I say! Oh—I’m sorry if I hurt you. How strong you are!”
“Let me!”
“No! Your lips are not for that—good God, that damnable thing! You yourself might be—”
“Let me! Oh, how cruel you are! It was my fault. But for me it would never have—”
“No! I would rather—”
“Let me! Oh, if you died!”
With all the force of her strong young body she wrenched away his protestant hands. A thirst and a sickish feeling were upon him, a curious irresponsible giddiness, and her hair which that struggle had brought in tumbled masses about her shoulders, seemed to have little flames running all over it. His foot had entirely lost its feeling. There was a strange weakness in his limbs.
He felt it with a cool thriving surprise. Could it be death stealing over him—really death, in this silly inglorious guise, from a miserable crawling reptile? Death, when he had just begun a life that seemed so worth living?
A sense of unreality came. He was asleep! The failure, the investigation, Virginia—all was a dream. Presently he would wake in his bachelor quarters to find his man setting out his coffee and grapefruit. He settled back and closed his eyes.
Moments of half-consciousness, or consciousness jumbled with strange imaginings, followed. At times he felt the pressure upon the wounded foot, was sensible of the suction of the young mouth striving desperately to draw the poison from the wound. From time to time he was conscious of a white desperate face haloed with hair that was a mist of woven sparkles. At times he thought himself a recumbent stone statue in a wood, and her a great tall golden-headed flower lying broken at his feet. Again he was a granite boulder and she a vine with yellow leaves winding and clinging about him. Then a blank—a sense of movement and of troublous disturbance, of insistent voices that called to him and inquisitive hands that plucked at him, and then voices growing distant again, and hands falling away, and at last—silence.