When she saw the silvery-looking instrument actually in his hand and observed the stern, harsh look in his eyes she gave a wild, hysterical laugh and walked quickly across to him. She clutched the shining thing from his hand and held it up before me.
"Now you both know the 'disgraceful secret' which Aunt Ida has made me keep so securely locked away from you," she cried, holding the instrument in her hand and pulling the piston backward and forward with a deftness born of long familiarity. "She made me promise to keep it a secret, for she said that if her 'society' friends knew of it I should be considered beyond the pale. Heavens knows that I am sorry for it and ashamed of it, but there was a mighty—temptation."
She sat down in the nearest chair and began to cry, her face buried in her folded arms, and her shoulders heaving convulsively. I went over quickly and laid my hand upon her head.
"Don't cry, Sophie!" I begged, "it will make your head worse; and—this doesn't make the slightest difference in our feeling for you. We are not 'society,' are we, Mr. Maxwell?"
I glanced appealingly toward him, but he did not see me. His eyes were fixed upon Sophie's bowed head with a pitying, yet horrified stare, then the look of bewilderment which he wore at the first sight of her came over his face, painfully intensified this time.
"My God!" he finally broke out, and I knew that he did not know he was speaking aloud. "I have seen you before to-night with that thing in your hand! I can even feel its sharp little sting in my arm—but where—where—I can't remember."
At his queer words Sophie looked quickly up, but he had already turned his back to us two and was leaving the room. We heard him linger a moment in the hall as if he might be looking for his hat; then the big front door closed behind him.
"He still doesn't remember!" she said slowly, looking at me in surprise. "I thought he would. I don't imagine that he has had much experience with trained nurses, so I fancied it would all come back to him when he found that I was one."
"You took care of him when his head was hurt last year?"
"Yes. I nursed him from the night he was brought into the hospital until he was almost out of danger—it was a long, tedious case, and we thought for a while that we were not going to save him."