It had been a night without rest, without the coolness and assuagement of a release from the fever of the day; and, Lee thought, he felt as haggard as Savina looked. A wind that was hardly more than an erratic stirring of super-heated dust agitated a loose slat in a shutter and deposited a fine dun film across the floor. Savina put as much as possible, so early, into her bags. Standing before a narrow mirror nailed to a wall, with her comb, she turned. “My hair is soaked,” she wailed; “just putting my arms up is more than I can manage. Haven't you been thinking about all the cold things in the world?” She slipped into a chair, spent and dejected, with her hair clouding one shoulder. It would, he repeated, be over soon, and he gazed at her with a veiled inspection. Savina was so entirely unprepared for this, the least hardship so new, that he was uncertain about the temper of her resistance.
Aware of his gaze, she smiled slowly at him, and, seated, again took up her task with the comb. “I couldn't have you see me very often like this,” she proceeded: “it would be fatal. I don't mean that when I'm finished I'm irresistible, but the process simply must go on in private. I don't want to be a wife, Lee—one of those creatures in a dressing sacque with hair pins in her mouth. I can't bear the thought of you and a flannel petticoat together. That is where married women make a serious mistake: they let their husbands see them while the maid is doing their hair, or when they're smeared with creams, or, maybe, with tonsilitis.” She rose. “I won't be a wife,” she chanted, “I won't be—”
Her voice broke suddenly. Lee thought she had tripped, he lunged forward, but she fell crumpling on the floor. “It's this hellish heat,” he asserted, lifting her to the bed. Her lips were open and dry, and her eyes, without vision, stared at the ceiling. Lee wet a handkerchief, dabbling it over her face; he had never before, he realized, seen a woman faint. It was terrifying but not grave; they did it, he had heard, very often. No wonder, after such a night. She had been gone over a minute now; there must be someone in the place who would know what to do. He put off moving, however, both because of his reluctance to leave Savina alone and because of the difficulty of any explanation. He took her hand; it was cold and damp, and her forehead was glistening with minute globes of sweat. All the blood seemed to have been withdrawn from her body.
“I'll have to go for help,” he said aloud, in a commonplace manner which yet struck curiously on his hearing. There was a faint quiver of her features, a scarcely perceptible sigh, and her fingers weakly closed on his grasp. “How foolish,” Savina murmured. She made an effort to raise herself up from the pillow, but he restrained her; Lee commanded her to be absolutely still. “The spirits of ammonia is in the dressing-case,” she whispered. He held the clouding aromatic liquid to her mouth and she took it laboriously. “Don't call anyone, Lee,” she continued; “I'll be all right in a little. So much at once! You see, I haven't been used to happiness. No wonder I was dizzy. But I fainted, Lee, didn't I? That's unusual for me.”
He sat beside her, at once moved and detached from her weakness, gently holding her supine hand. She mustn't worry, he told her at short intervals. “Don't worry, this is nothing.”
“You'll give me time to dress for the train,” she insisted. “As soon as we get away from here I shall be better. We will, won't we?”
“Get away? What nonsense! Of course. You will be up by noon, but there is no good in your stirring before you have to. If Daniel comes, you can see him here, in your bed. Or you needn't see him at all. It's just as you feel.”
Even as she lay, prostrate, on the bed, he could see her collapse; the strength, animation, interest, drained away from her; it seemed to Lee that momentarily she was again in a coma. He leaned over and placed a hand on her brow. Savina's eye-lids fluttered. Under her breast her heart was scarcely discernible. Suddenly he didn't like it; abruptly an apprehension, from which he was obliged to bar a breath of panic, possessed him. Lee covered her lightly with a sheet, and went out, softly closing the door. Before the hotel he caught the proprietor by a shoulder and pointed up to his room. “Sick, sick,” he repeated the term with increasing emphasis, not successful in banishing his vagueness of dismay. The proprietor smiled uncertainly, edging from under the weight of Lee's hand. Then, “Get my brother, Mr. Daniel Randon, at once,” he commanded; “soon. Mr. Randon; the sugar—” Lee waved in the direction of the mill.
This the other again comprehended, and Lee saw a youth swing a bare leg over a convenient horse and vanish behind the Cobra Hotel. He went back to the room: Savina hadn't moved while he had been gone. She seemed even weaker—a thing he would have declared impossible—than before. He bathed her face and throat in water, and there was a murmur of gratitude, of love, so low that, with his ear against her lips, the individual words were lost. His disturbance increased and, when the heavy firm steps of Daniel Randon had approached on the cement of the corridor without, and he had knocked and entered, Lee pointed to the bed with an unconcealed anxiety.