“No. He hass just fainted. You are not to talk!”
The imperious little hand slipped down to cover my mouth, and Kenneth Montagu kissed it where it lay. For a minute she did not lift the hand, what time I lay in a dream of warm happiness. A chuckle from the opposite seat aroused me. The eyes in the colourless face had opened, and Volney sat looking at us with an ironic smile.
“I must have fallen asleep—and before a lady. A thousand apologies! And for awaking so inopportunely, ten thousand more!”
He changed his position that he might look the easier at her, a half-humorous admiration in his eyes. “Sweet, you beggar my vocabulary. As the goddess of healing you are divine.”
The flush of alarmed maiden modesty flooded her cheek.
“You are to lie still, else the wound will break out again,” she said sharply.
“Faith, it has broken out,” he feebly laughed, pretending to misunderstand. Then, “Oh, you mean the sword cut. ’Twould never open after it has been dressed by so fair a leech.”
The girl looked studiously out of the coach window and made no answer. Now, weak as I was—in pain and near to death, my head on her lap with her dear hand to cool my fevered brow—yet was I fool enough to grow insanely jealous that she had used her kerchief to bind his wound. His pale, handsome face was so winning and his eyes so beautiful that they thrust me through the heart as his sword had been unable to do.
He looked at me with an odd sort of friendliness, the respect one man has for another who has faced death without flinching.