She smiled, and, I tell you, no monster could have resisted that tenderness.
“What is there?” I whispered, pointing with my free hand.
Her eyes opened as children’s eyes will do in the distress of innocence; her feeble hand moved in mine as a little weak animal might move. Her face refilled with pain.
“Something is there,” she whispered.
“What?”
She shook her head weakly.
The nurse touched my elbow. I thanked her for reminding me of the chances I was taking with the little girl’s quiet. I left instructions; then, perhaps not wholly at peace with myself, I crept softly down the stairs. I did not wish an interview with Mrs. Marbury. I did not wish to see that begging look on her face. I would have been glad to have escaped Marbury himself.
He was waiting for me. He waited at the bottom of the steps with that smug financial face of his—a mask through which, in that moment, the warmth of suffering and love seemed struggling to escape. He was plucking, from his thin crop, gray hairs that he could ill afford to lose.
I anticipated his questions.
“It is a matter of conservation of strength,” I told him; “a question of mental state, a question of the nervous system. No man can answer now—beforehand.”