“Her breathing is quieter,” she whispered. “I think she’s going to sleep. It’s been a terrible night! You must be horribly tired. I will find you some place to sleep.”
“It has been a strenuous campaign,” he admitted. “I’ve been practically without sleep for three nights, but that’s all in my job. I won’t mind if Higley will ‘soak’ those fellows properly.”
She looked troubled. “I don’t know what to do about a bed for you; everything is taken—except the couch in the front room.”
“Don’t trouble, I beg of you. I can pitch down anywhere. I’m used to hard beds. I must be up early to-morrow, anyway.”
“Please don’t go till after breakfast,” she smiled, wanly, “I may need you.”
He understood. “What did the doctor say?”
“He said mother was in a very low state of vitality and that she must be very careful, which was easy enough to say. But how can I get her to rest and to diet? You have seen how little she cares for the doctor’s orders. He told her not to touch alcohol.”
“She is more like a man than a woman,” he answered.
She led the way into the small sitting-room which lay at the front of the house, and directly opposite the door of her own room. It was filled with shabby parlor furniture, and in one corner stood a worn couch. “I’m sorry, but I can offer nothing better,” she said. “Every bed is taken, but I have plenty of blankets.”
There was something delightfully suggestive in being thus waited upon by a young and handsome woman, and the ranger submitted to it with the awkward grace of one unaccustomed to feminine care. The knowledge that the girl was beneath him in birth, and that she was considered to be (in a sense) the lovely flower of a corrupt stock, made the manifest innocency of her voice and eyes the more appealing. He watched her moving about the room with eyes in which a furtive flame glowed.