She felt herself to be a different woman; in some curious way emancipated. It had needed just the wounding of this man to change her. She was ashamed no longer to show him what she felt, nor had she any more a shrinking from doing what she now believed it right to do.
She stood above him as he sat in a new docility before her, and bathed the cut upon his temple, with lingering, tender touch, pushing back the hair to get at it. She knelt before him and dressed the cut upon his hand.
"I managed to do this myself in trying to get the knife away from him," the doctor explained.
With his unwounded hand he took an ivory-handled penknife, stained red with blood, from his pocket, and held it before her eyes. It had been a gift from her to the man who was now her husband in the early days of their acquaintance, before the thought of marriage had risen between them. With all the valuables he had pawned and lost and thrown away, strange that this worthless gift of the girl whose life he had ruined should have stuck to him; stranger still that after all those years she should be able to recognise it beyond possibility of doubt! He held it towards the basin of water as though to rinse it, but she took it from him and laid it aside.
"Let it be!" she said. "I shall know what to do with the knife."
The doctor's outside patients might be crying aloud for him; it was more than noontide, and he should long have been about his work; the patient in the private ward should have had Sister Marion at his side; but the pair lingered in the little red-and-white tiled ward kitchen, bathed in the warm rays of the golden afternoon sun. The dressing of the wounds was a long business, and to the ministering woman heavenly sweet.
Over the cut upon his forehead the short, dark hair had to be combed. By altering the place of parting this was easily done. And Sister Marion, looking down upon him to see the effect, thrilled to find eyes, usually cold and preoccupied, fixed in a rapture of adoration upon her face.
"No woman in the world has such a tender touch as you," he said. "My mother used to kiss my hurts to make them well. Will you do that too for me?"
Then the woman with murder in her heart stooped and kissed him tenderly as a mother upon his brow, knelt for an instant before him, and kissed his hand.
"Good-bye," she said, "Good-bye;" and without another word left him and went upon her business to the private ward.