A woman's compassion, more easily aroused by a cut finger than by a suffering mind, narrowed the chasm between them, until a small, soft voice bridged it.
"Dick!" she cried. "Oh, Dick."
But the stiff face remained rigid, so the frightened girl quickened her pace until she was well in front; then, turning, she saw that their lids covered two-thirds of the eye-balls, and that the mechanism of the man was driven by an impulse of which, if it were his at all, he was surely not conscious.
As he reached her side, she laid a hand on him, and, "Dick!" she cried again.
The man started, turning his face the wrong way.
The eyes did not open, but the jaw muscles relaxed, letting the cold pipe fall from his teeth. The blind effort which he made to catch it overbalanced the automaton.
He pitched forward, and would have fallen on his face, but for the shoulder which stopped his head, and the arms that clutched his reeling body.
Accurate instinct loosened her joints as the weight struck her, and she came slowly to her knees, sinking back until she sat upon her heels, so that the man received no shock. She had turned halfside-ways as she went down; and kneeling, held him across her, with the uninjured cheek strained upon her left shoulder, and his heels far away to her right.
She looked down into the face, where the eyes were now wholly covered.
The dark semi-circles under the closed lids and the deepened lines of the thin face moved in her compassion as tender as she felt for the bleeding bruise on the cheek. She remembered how he had nursed her, and given her, by his mere sympathy and control, that hour's wonderful sleep. She remembered him crawling, at the acme of her terror, through the slit of the window; saving her from the Dutch woman; turning his back while she dressed; leaping like a heaven-sent devil over the stair-rail; fighting Ockley with his fists—and refused to remember that same enemy brought utterly to an end of his enmity.