It was a poor little appeal she made, as words went. Her voice was hardly whisper-high, so labored was her breathing. She held out her hands to them one after the other, in supplication.
"You won't do it! Oh, please don't! I came—— You mustn't——" Her breath came in gasps.
Von Rittenheim mutely took the pleading hands in his, and reverently kissed them. He faced the Doctor brokenly.
"I thought you had heaped upon me every humiliation. Until now this was lacking. You might have spared me this!"
Mounting his mule he broke into the thicket and disappeared.
The two left behind—the tawny, stooping Carolinian and the girl, gone white-lipped in spite of the beating of her heart—stared in silence at the copse as long as they could hear the crash of the breaking twigs and resisting branches.
Sydney still was intent on the lessening sounds when the old man's keen blue eyes withdrew themselves from the wood and scrutinized her face, pitiably drawn and colorless.
"H'm," he grunted, and added, mentally, "Hard lines for Bob."
The sound of his ejaculation reached the girl's dulled ears. She turned to him with a touch of distrust, and yet a look of question that seemed to implore her old friend for an explanation that might save him to her as an honest man. The Doctor was touched by it. He nodded in the direction in which the Baron had disappeared.
"Crazy, plumb crazy," he averred.