He was listless, seeming without volition, quite willing to surrender himself into her keeping.  What dazed thoughts were his upon this first awakening were lost, forgotten in the brief doze into which she succeeded in luring him.  When again he stirred and woke she was still at his side, kneeling upon the hard rock floor beside him. . . .  She had had Patten help her to lift him down from the table before she despatched Patten with the note for John Engle.  Again she pleaded with him to lie still and just trust to her.

He was very still.  She knew that he was trying to piece together his fragmentary thoughts and impressions, seeking to bridge over from last night to to-day.  So she talked softly with him, soothing him alike with the tenderness of her voice and the pressure and gentle stroke of her hand upon his hand and arm.  He had had an accident but was going to be all right from now on.  But he must not be moved for a little.  Therefore Engle would come soon, and perhaps Mrs. Engle with him.  And a wagon bringing a real bed and fresh clean sheets and all of those articles which she had listed.  It would not be very long now until Engle came.

But at last when she paused his hand shut down upon hers and he asked quietly: 

“I didn’t dream it all, did I, Virginia?  It is hard to know just what I did and what I dreamed I did.  But it seems more than a dream. . . .  Was it I who robbed Kemble of the Quigley mines?”

“Yes,” she told him lightly, as though it were a matter of small moment.  “But you were not responsible for what you did.”

“And there were other robberies?  I even tried to steal from you?”

“Yes,” she answered again.

“And you wanted to have me submit to an operation?  And I would not?”

“Yes.”

“And then . . . then you . . . you did it?”

So she explained, feeling that certainty would be less harmful to him now than a continual struggle to penetrate the curtain of semidarkness obscuring his memory.

“I took it upon myself,” she told him at the end.  “I took the chance that you might die; that it might be I who had killed you.  Perhaps I had no right to do it.  But I have succeeded; I have drawn you back from kleptomania to your own clear moral strength.  You will get well, Rod Norton; you will be an honest man.  But I took it upon myself to take the chances for you.  Now . . . do you think that you can forgive me?”

He appeared to be pondering the matter.  When his reply came it was couched in the form of a question: 

“Would you have done it, Virginia . . . if you didn’t love me a little as I love you?”

And her answer comforted him.  He was sleeping when the Engles came.