There was left in the Southerner’s manner no trace of the cross-examiner. Suspicion had departed from him at the first sight of that old and still face, leaving only sympathy and pity.
“My patient.”
“Have you been running a private hospital up here?”
“Oh, no. I took her because there was no other place fit for her to go to. And I had to keep her presence secret, because there’s a law against harboring lepers here. A pretty cruel brute of a law it is, too.”
“Leprosy!” exclaimed Carroll, looking at that strange silvery face with a shudder. “Isn’t it fearfully contagious?”
“Not in any ordinary sense. I was trying a new serum on her, and had planned to smuggle her across to Curaçao, when this ended it.”
“Curaçao? Then that pass for yourself and wife—By the way, that and your coat are over in the thicket, where I dropped them.”
“Thank you. But it doesn’t say ‘wife.’ It says simply ‘a woman.’”
“And you were encumbering yourself with an unknown leper, at a time like this, just as an act of human kindness?” There was something almost reverential in Carroll’s voice.
“Scientific interest, in part. Besides, she wasn’t wholly unknown. She’s a sort of cousin of Raimonda’s.”