Part 57

"Can I do anything for you?" It certainly was HER voice.

"Is it you, Pauline?" he asked, as if he feared a negative answer.

"Yes--John."

A long silence, then he said: "Why did you come?"

"The doctor wrote me that--wrote me the truth."

"But haven't you heard? Haven't you seen the papers? Don't they say I'm ruined?"

"Yes, John."

He lay silent for several minutes. Then he asked hesitatingly: "And--when--do you--go back--West?"

"I have come to stay," she replied. Neither in her voice nor in her face was there a hint of what those five words meant to her.

He closed his eyes again. Presently a tear slid from under each lid and stood in the deep, wasted hollows of his eye-sockets.

XXVI.

A DESPERATE RALLY.

When he awoke again he felt that he should get well rapidly. He was weak, but it seemed the weakness of hunger rather than of illness. His head was clear, his nerves tranquil; his mind was as hungry for action as his body was for food.

"As soon as I've had something to eat," he said to himself, "I'll be better than for years. I needed this." And straightway he began to take hold of the outside world.

"Are you there, Pauline?" he asked, after perhaps half an hour during which his mind had swiftly swept the whole surface of his affairs.

The nurse rose from the lounge across the foot of the bed. "Your wife was worn out, Mr. Dumont," she began. "She has--"

"What day is it?" he interrupted.

"Thursday."

"Of the month, I mean."

"The seventeenth," she answered, smiling in anticipation of his astonishment.

But he said without change of expression,

"Then I've been ill three weeks and three days. Tell Mr. Culver I wish to see him at once."

"But the doctor--"

"Damn the doctor," replied Dumont, good-naturedly. "Don't irritate me by opposing. I shan't talk with Culver a minute by the clock. What I say will put my mind at rest. Then I'll eat something and sleep for a day at least."

The nurse hesitated, but his eyes fairly forced her out of the room to fetch Culver. "Now remember, Mr. Dumont--less than a minute," she said. "I'll come back in just sixty seconds."

"Come in forty," he replied. When she had closed the door he said to Culver: "What are the quotations on Woolens?"

"Preferred twenty-eight; Common seven," answered Culver. "They've been about steady for two weeks."

"Good. And what's Great Lakes and Gulf?"