Otto thought over it.
“You mean—save her from doing something for pity that she wouldn’t do if she had time to think?”
Sorell assented.
“Why should that fellow be any more likely now to make her happy—”
“Because he’s lost his money and his father? I don’t know why he should. I dare say he’ll begin bullying and slave-driving again—when he’s forgotten all this. But—”
“But what?”
“Well—you see—I didn’t think he could possibly care about anything but himself. I thought he was as hard as a millstone all through. Well, he isn’t. That’s so queer!”
The speaker’s voice took a dreamy tone.
Sorell glanced in bitterness at the maimed hand lying on the bed. It was still bandaged, but he knew very well what sort of a shapeless, ruined thing it would emerge, when the bandages were thrown aside. It was strange and fascinating—to a student of psychology—that Otto should have been brought, so suddenly, so unforeseeably, into this pathetic and intimate relation with the man to whom, essentially, he owed his disaster. But what difference did it make in the quality of the Marmion outrage, or to any sane judgment of Douglas Falloden?
“Go to sleep, old boy,” he said at last. “You’ll have a hard time to-morrow.”