She held a dead wait with a hand on the door-knob behind her, the other unconsciously plucking at lace which, in this novel modesty of raiment, clothed chastely that bosom of fine fullness—dusky eyes quick in a face that wanted a shade or so of its habitually high illumination, lips a trace apart as if with a cry unsounded.
But the pause imposed by her illegible emotion was brief of life, with her next breath Liane recollected herself and, uttering a low sound of compassion crossed the room to kneel by the head of the berth.
"No, no, my friend!" She spoke in French, her arms lightly forced back to the pillow the shoulders which Lanyard was lifting. "Rest tranquil—with that poor head! Thou dost still suffer greatly, my old one?"
Lanyard mumbled a dashed negative with lips that were muffled, before he could object, by lips ardent and tender, whose clinging intimacy he escaped at length only by moving his head aside.
Happily, that movement excited only a grumble of pain, entirely bearable; he was able to muster a smile by way of redressing the rebuff.
"I say!" he remonstrated in his most British English—"we are getting on, rather—aren't we?"
The woman drew back sharply and, half-kneeling, half resting on her heels, showed a face sad with reproach. "Hast thou forgotten, then?"
"More than I guessed, going on this bit of business, my dear." Lanyard was firm in his stand against French; it was easier to be unsentimental in sound Anglo-Saxon, a tongue that enabled one to avoid using the too personal "thou" without administering an affront unpardonable. "What bothers me most is this," he proceeded in querulous vein, a self-conscious smile accounting for his neglect of the stricken eyes staring into his: "I've remembered and forgotten much too much, all at once. It's damned discouraging—you may be interested to know—to wake up from what amounted to a sound long nap and find that seven perfectly useful months have been stolen while one slept."
"It is true, then, what I feared!"
"Afraid it is, Liane, if what you feared was that a blow on the head had bumped my right mind back to its throne."