Alice Deringham bent her head again, and, when the doctor went out with Seaforth, sat down beside the bed.  Her fatigue had gone from her, and though she had never done such things before, she gently drew the coverings higher about the man, and once ventured to raise his head a trifle and smooth down the pillow.  Alton opened his eyes, and for a moment they seemed to follow her, but the gleam of understanding went out of them when she sat down again.  Then he lay very still, and there was an oppressive quietness through which she could hear the crackle of the stove and the night wind moaning about the ranch.  Alton’s eyes were shut now, and the girl sat and watched him, too intent almost to wonder at herself.  This was the man she had striven to despise, and yet she, who had never concerned herself with woman’s work before, forgot her weariness as she waited to minister to him.  It was but little help that she could offer—­a gentle touch that checked a restless movement, a wrinkle smoothed from the pillow—­but it was done with a great tenderness, for fibres in the girl’s nature that had lain silent long awoke that night and thrilled.

Now and then Alton moved a little, and once or twice he moaned.  The firewood snapped and crackled in the stove, the sigh of the pines came up in fantastic cadence across the clearing, and so while the dark angel stooped above the lonely ranch the night wore on.

There was, however, one man in Somasco ranch who needed sleep that night and found it fly from him.  Deringham, who had spoken with the doctor, lay fully dressed in an adjoining room, listening to the ticking of his watch, and for any sound that might rise from beyond the cedar boarding where his daughter kept her vigil.  He had gathered that before the morning Alton of Somasco and Carnaby would either have laid aside his activities for ever or be within hope of recovery, and while Deringham dare not ask himself just then whether he desired the death of his kinsman, the suspense was maddening.  If the flame of vitality that was flickering so feebly went out Carnaby would be his daughter’s, and the burden which almost crushed him lifted.  If it burned on there was at the best a long struggle with adversity before him, and at the worst disgrace, and possibly a prison.

A very little thing, he knew, would turn the scale, an effort made in delirium, a draught that struck too shrewdly on the fevered frame, and the issue, of stupendous importance as it was to both of them, lay in his daughter’s hands.  Seaforth and the doctor slept the sleep of exhaustion, and Deringham could have laughed with bitter mirthlessness at the irony of it all.  Until she had quarrelled with her maid, Alice Deringham had apparently been incapable of putting on her own dresses unassisted, and it seemed that the grim, mysterious destiny which treated men as puppets and traversed all their schemes was the one factor to reckon with in that comedy.