The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight, and the shadows were gathering around his bed, when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he were awake, and, next, what he would like to have for his supper.  Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly:  he was not hungry; if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would come to disturb him, it was all he would ask.  He tried to say it crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent—­dissembling again.  But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.

“You are not so well this evening,” she said softly, laying a cool palm on his forehead.  “I think I’d better telephone Doctor Dillon.”

Now the thing for Patricia’s lover to do was obvious.  With pity thus trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand.  It was a fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain—­the lover’s ability to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say:  “No; I don’t want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone.  Please latch the door when you go out, and tell father and his—­and Mrs. Blount that I don’t want to be disturbed.”

She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the little brutality.  But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim determination which had prompted the brutality.  The dusk was thickening, and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of radiance.  Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to subside.

The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the outside.  Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.

Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes, he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor.  Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the revolving doors.  More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding hat-brim and the muffling rain-coat saved him.

Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk to the Temple Court.  Instead, he crept around to a garage near the hotel and hired a two-seated road-car.  Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted to send his own driver, and Blount counted it as an unavoidable misfortune that he was obliged to give his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say:  “Oh, sure!  I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Blount.  I reckon Senator Dave’s son can have anything o’ mine that he wants.”