“You risked your life,” murmured Paul Dabney; “you risked your life to save me...” He stopped me as we climbed up the hill. It was very dark there amongst the trees. He took me by the wrists, and, “Janice Gale,” he said desperately, speaking through his teeth, “look up at me, for the love of God.”
I did look up, and he plunged his eyes into mine as though he were diving for a soul.
I put up no barriers between my heart and his searching eyes. It was so dusky there that he could not read any of my secrets. I let him search till at last he sighed from the bottom of his soul, and let my hands fall, passing his own across his forehead with a pitiful air of confusion and defeat.
“'La belle dame sans merci has thee in thrall,'” he murmured, and we went up into the glimmering twilight of the open spaces where the swallows were still wheeling high in search of the falling sun.
When we reached the house, I asked Paul Dabney timidly if he did not think it best to change and not to alarm Mrs. Brane by any sight of his condition. He agreed with a wry sort of smile, and went slowly up the stairs. I saw that he held tight to the railing, and that his feet dragged. He was very near, indeed, to collapse; the walk up the hill had been almost too much for him.
Nevertheless, he appeared at dinner-time as trim and neat as possible, with the air of demure boyishness, which was so disarming, completely restored.
Not only was he neat and trim in person, but he was mentally alert and gay. He ate hardly anything, to be sure, drank not at all, and sat, tight-strung, leaning a little forward in his chair, his hand in his pocket, as he laughed and talked. His eyes held, beneath bright, innocent surfaces, rather a harried, hunted look. But he was very entertaining, so much so that his pallor, the little choking cough that bothered him, and my own condition of limp reaction to the desperate excitement of the afternoon, passed entirely unnoticed by Mrs. Brane. Her better spirits of the morning had returned in force. She was very glad to see Paul Dabney, so glad that I suffered a twinge of heart.
“Oh,” she laughed, “but it's good to have a man in the house. Shakespeare is right, you know, when he says, 'a woman naturally born to fears.'”
“I don't think he was right at all,” Paul Dabney took her up. “I believe that the man is naturally the more fearful animal. Shakespeare ought to have said, 'a woman naturally feigning fear.' I'm with the modern poet, 'the female of the species is more deadly than the male.' Take the lady spider, for instance.”
“What does the lady spider do?” asked Mrs. Brane.