She watched him, speechless and fascinated, for a few seconds.  Then Burke set the lamp upon the chair against which she had leaned all the night, and bent down to her.

“Let me help you!” he said.

A shuddering horror of the sight before her came upon her.  She yielded herself to him in silence.  She was shivering violently from head to foot.  Her limbs were so numb she could not stand.  He raised her and drew her away.

The next thing she knew was that she was sitting on the bed in her own room, and he was making her drink brandy and water in so burning a mixture that it stung her throat.

She tried to protest, but he would take no refusal till she had swallowed what he had poured out.  Then he put down the glass, tucked her feet up on the bed with an air of mastery, and spread a rug over her.

He would have left her then with a brief injunction to remain where she was, but she caught and held his arm so that he was obliged to pause.

“Burke, is that dreadful man a doctor?”

“The only one I could get hold of,” said Burke.  “Yes, he’s a doctor all right.  Saul Kieff his name is.  I admit he’s a scoundrel, but anyway he’s keen on his job.”

“You think he’ll save Guy?” she said tremulously.  “Oh, Burke, he must be saved!  He must be saved!”

An odd look came into Burke’s eyes.  She remembered it later, though it was gone in an instant like the sudden flare of lightning across a dark sky.

“We shall do our best,” he said.  “You stay here till I come back!”

She let him go.  Somehow that look had given her a curious shock though she did not understand it.  She heard the door shut firmly behind him, and she huddled herself down upon the pillow and lay still.

She wished he had not made her drink that fiery draught.  All her senses were in a tumult, and yet her body felt as if weighted with lead.  She lay listening tensely for every sound, but the silence was like a blanket wrapped around her—­a blanket which nothing seemed to penetrate.

It seemed to overwhelm her at last, that silence, to blot out the clamour of her straining nerves, to deprive her of the power to think.  Though she did not know it, the stress of that night’s horror and vigil had worn her out.  She sank at length into a deep sleep from which it seemed that nought could wake her.  And when more than an hour later, Burke came, treading softly, and looked upon her, he did not need to keep that burning hunger-light out of his eyes.  For she was wholly unconscious of him as though her spirit were in another world.

He looked and looked with a gaze that seemed as if it would consume her.  And at last he leaned over her, with arms outspread, and touched her sunny, disordered hair with his lips.  It was the lightest touch, far too light to awaken her.  But, as if some happy thought had filtered down through the deeps of her repose, she stirred in her sleep.  She turned her face up to him with the faint smile of a slumbering child.