“Much better—­since you came.  Did they tell you it was a dog?”

She nodded, and he went on.

“It was my unlucky night, I guess.  Did the fire burn up my office?  I forgot to ask Mrs. Blount about that.”

“No; it was a building across the street from the Temple Court.”

“‘Small favors thankfully received,’” he quoted, resolutely pushing a fresh recurrence of the tomtom beatings into the background; “small favors and larger ones in proportion—­this broth, for example.  It’s simply delicious.  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.”

“The broth ought to be good; I made it myself, you know.”

“You did?  Where, for pity’s sake?”

“In the hotel kitchen.  The chef was furious at first.  He twirled his Napoleon-III mustaches and sputtered and swelled up like an angry old turkey.  But when I talked nice to him in his own beloved Bordelaise he let me do anything I pleased.”

Blount looked up quickly, and the movement brought the head-throbbings back with disconcerting celerity.

“You are cruelly kind to me, Patricia; everybody is kind to me.  And I’m not needing kindness just now,” he ended.

“Aren’t you?  I don’t agree with you, and I’m sure your father and Mrs. Blount wouldn’t.”  Then she went on to tell him how they had all been up, watching the progress of the fire from their windows, when the word came that he had been hurt in the street.  Also, she told how his father had impatiently smashed the telephone because, the wires having been cut and tangled in the fire, he could get no response, and how, thereupon, he had turned the entire night force of the hotel out to go in search of a doctor.  “But with all that, he couldn’t stand it to look on while the doctor was taking the stitches,” she added.  “He turned his back and tramped over here to the window; and I could hear him gritting his teeth and—­and swearing.”

If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should, it was because there are limits to the finest fortitude.  Patricia ran on cheerfully, minimizing her own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying the anxious and affectionate concern of the senator and his wife.  He listened because he could not help it; but when he had finished, and she was inquiring if there was anything else she could do for him, he dissembled, saying that he would try to sleep, and asking her to shut out more of the daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.

She promised; but naturally enough, with the dreadful responsibility drawing nearer with every hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased travelling-clock on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him.  Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon in feverish impatience, slipping now and then into the shadow land of delirium when the pain was severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea.  At whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute to do his part.  Gryson must be met, the evidence of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself must be defeated.