“You are going to...?” she began tremulously.

“Wash up.”

She recoiled from the brutality, and her lips tightened.

“Listen, Grant,” she said steadily.  “I shall tell his brother.  I know the Strang breed.  If you can forget old sake, so can I. If you don’t do something, he’ll kill you.  Why, even Tom Daw would if I asked.”

“You should know me better than to threaten,” he reproved gravely, then added, with a sneer:  “Besides, I don’t see how killing me will help your Rex Strang.”

She gave a low gasp, closed her lips tightly, and watched his quick eyes take note of the trembling that had beset her.

“It’s not hysteria, Grant,” she cried hastily and anxiously, with clicking teeth.  “You never saw me with hysteria.  I’ve never had it.  I don’t know what it is, but I’ll control it.  I am merely beside myself.  It’s partly anger—­with you.  And it’s apprehension and fear.  I don’t want to lose him.  I do love him, Grant.  He is my king, my lover.  And I have sat here beside him so many dreadful days now.  Oh, Grant, please, please.”

“Just nerves,” he commented drily.  “Stay with it.  You can best it.  If you were a man I’d say take a smoke.”

She went unsteadily back to the stool, where she watched him and fought for control.  From the rough fireplace came the singing of a cricket.  Outside two wolf-dogs bickered.  The injured man’s chest rose and fell perceptibly under the fur robes.  She saw a smile, not altogether pleasant, form on Linday’s lips.

“How much do you love him?” he asked.

Her breast filled and rose, and her eyes shone with a light unashamed and proud.  He nodded in token that he was answered.

“Do you mind if I take a little time?” He stopped, casting about for the way to begin.  “I remember reading a story—­Herbert Shaw wrote it, I think.  I want to tell you about it.  There was a woman, young and beautiful; a man magnificent, a lover of beauty and a wanderer.  I don’t know how much like your Rex Strang he was, but I fancy a sort of resemblance.  Well, this man was a painter, a bohemian, a vagabond.  He kissed—­oh, several times and for several weeks—­and rode away.  She possessed for him what I thought you possessed for me ... at Lake Geneva.  In ten years she wept the beauty out of her face.  Some women turn yellow, you know, when grief upsets their natural juices.

“Now it happened that the man went blind, and ten years afterward, led as a child by the hand, he stumbled back to her.  There was nothing left.  He could no longer paint.  And she was very happy, and glad he could not see her face.  Remember, he worshipped beauty.  And he continued to hold her in his arms and believe in her beauty.  The memory of it was vivid in him.  He never ceased to talk about it, and to lament that he could not behold it.

“One day he told her of five great pictures he wished to paint.  If only his sight could be restored to paint them, he could write finis and be content.  And then, no matter how, there came into her hands an elixir.  Anointed on his eyes, the sight would surely and fully return.”