"Three to one!" panted Marcus. "It's a plot! it's a trap! I know you, Freeze. I see through all of you. But three ain't enough. You can't do it; no!"
Abbie Brainard came rushing through the hall. She reached the threshold and paused there to see her brother catch up her paper-cutter from the table, plunge it into her father's neck, and break through the window, and to hear his nimble feet clatter escape down the stairs of the side porch.
Brainard fell heavily against the marble slabs of the fire-place. Blood soaked his high, old-fashioned collar and trickled down the plaits of his shirt-front. He lay there stunned and bleeding, and lifeless—as it seemed.
His huge bulk was gotten laboriously to bed—half dragged, half lifted. He lay there for a fortnight, between life and death.
The doctor came, and with the chill gray of the first dawn came the nurse. It was to be a hand-to-hand struggle, and all the forces were engaged at once. The nurse spent the first halfhour of uncertain daylight in bringing order out of the chaos that had established its instant sway in the old man's room on the evening before. She raised or lowered the shades, adjusted the transom, quieted the fire, and arranged her bottles and bandages. She wore the dull uniform of a public institution; and she was accustomed to carry this uniform at a moment's notice into strange places and among strange people. She accepted her assignment blindly, and took up its details afterwards.
She seemed of a rather rugged, stolid build, but her eyes were eloquent with a haunting sorrow. It was as if time had redraped her figure with the flesh that sorrow and suffering had once stripped from it, but had been powerless to reclothe her spirit in its pristine hope and cheerfulness.
"'Three to one,' panted Marcus."
She stood at the window, endeavoring to get her bearings in the early light of the dim morning. The lilacs and syringas in the yard showed the crinkled brownness of latest autumn. A boy was crossing and recrossing the street to put out its lamps; and in the second-story window of the stable the flickering of a single gas-jet was helping the coachman and hostler to make up his own bed.