"That will quiet you," she said, and sat beside him on the bed. From the pocket of her apron she drew the penknife with which the doctor had been wounded. "Do you remember this?" she asked him. "There is blood upon it, but that is going to be wiped out."
He looked at her with eyes from which the consciousness was dying, and did not struggle any more.
"Do you remember it?" she asked again. "You had cut your name and mine on a tree in the garden of my home, and you asked for the penknife as a memento. Is it possible you can have forgotten?"
She spoke to him with great deliberation, holding the penknife before his eyes, and watching the drooping of the heavy lids.
"Strange, isn't it, that, so much having been flung away, you should have kept this miserable little keepsake with you till to-day? I suppose its small blade is its sharp blade still?"
Slowly she opened it, and stood up.
With an effort he opened his eyes upon her. "I am dead with sleep," he said, in a hollow, far-away voice; "but I can't sleep with my hands tied. Set me free, Marion! Set me free!"
"It is that I am going to do," she said.
She leant above him then, and, with fingers that never trembled, unbuttoned the wrists of his flannel shirt and rolled the sleeves back to his shoulders. How thin the arms were; how plainly the veins showed up in the white, moist skin. Across one that rose like a fine blue cord from the bend of the arm she drew the sharp blade of the knife. He gave but the slightest start, so heavy was he with sleep. She knelt upon his pillow, leant across him, and in the other arm severed the corresponding vein.
She had thought that the blood would flow quietly—how it spurted and spouted and ran! Before she could untie his hands and lay them beneath the blanket at his sides the white, lean arms were crimson with blood. At this rate, it would not take him long to die! She rinsed the blood from the little penknife in a basin of water, and turning down the blanket, laid it upon his breast.