“Jim Fortier!” he repeated angrily. “Then it was what I thought. Who saved me—you?”
“No, no, I only got the others—O’Leary and the rest.”
“They almost had me,” he said slowly. A great weakness seemed to overcome him, for an unusual gentleness came into his voice, the quiet tone of weak convalescence. “You can tell me the rest—I can stand it. What happened?”
“Don’t you think you had better be quiet?” she said anxiously. “It has been a shock.”
“Yes,” he said with a shudder, and his hand clutched her shoulder as though clinging desperately to it, while in the subdued torment on his face there was a sudden flickering passage of absolute terror that caused her to cry:
“Mr. Dangerfield, Mr. Dangerfield, don’t look that way! I can’t bear it.”
Her face was so close to his, flushed with compassion and tenderness, that this imminence of youth and affection brought back into his eyes a touch of quiet and gratitude.
“Why do you care so much?” he said greedily.
“I do; I do,” she said, gazing at him earnestly. “When you suffer, it just tears my heart.”
He closed his eyes and smiled, and she was afraid that the tyranny of the chloroform was asserting itself again; but suddenly he opened his eyes and said, raising one finger as though in warning: