Galt stood gazing at her for a moment, an almost uncontrollable yearning on him to clasp her in his arms and beg her forgiveness. He might have done so but for the fear of offending her. He glanced up the stairs. How still it was above! How like death! In his alarmed fancy he saw the two doctors standing aghast over the still, senseless form of his child. They had miscalculated! The physical examination had misled them; ether should have been the drug employed rather than chloroform!
Uncovering her face, Dora read his thoughts. She uttered a low, despairing wail, and they stood looking into each other's eyes. There was a sound of sudden movement on the floor above. Some one was raising a window-sash at the top of the stairs.
“I am sweating like an ox!” they heard Dearing say; and--could they believe their ears?--he was actually laughing, and calling out to Lionel: “I told you you'd not know when it was done. Now, lie down and go to sleep. You are as sound as a silver dollar. It may sting just a little tiny bit when you swallow, but that will be gone by to-morrow. Go to sleep, and when you wake I'll have that tricycle ready.”
“Thank God--thank God,” Dora exclaimed, “he is saved!”
She started up the stairs, and in desperation Galt caught her arm. “Wait one moment, Dora,” he implored, “I have something to say. You must hear me. I am--”
“Don't stop me!” She shook his hand loose from her sleeve, and the haughty look of contempt he had noticed before rose into her fathomless eyes as she glanced back at him. “I am going up to him. I won't waken him. I'll be very quiet, but I must be near him.”
Standing at the foot of the stairs, he saw her ascend and disappear above. How beautiful she was! How rare and exquisite--how infinitely removed from her kind. And that was Dora--the Dora of all that was good and pure of his past, the guileless victim of all that was low, sordid, and unworthy within him!
|TOBY LASSITER returned from the West one sultry evening at dusk, and went straight to the house of his employer. He found the banker seated on the front porch without his coat, and cooling himself with a big palm-leaf fan. “So you are back?” he said, casting a furtive glance over his shoulder into the unlighted hall. “Get that chair and pull it up close. If my wife happens to come out while you are talking, sort o' switch off to something else--the market reports--anything under high heavens except what you went off for. She never took to Fred noway, and anything in his favor or otherwise sets her tongue going. She thinks he is plumb out of my present calculations, and any hint that he was getting on his feet would give her tantrums. She is back in the kitchen, seeing to the supper things. She is as close as the bark of a tree, and is afraid that nigger woman will lug off supplies. I took her because she was stingy. I sort o' admired it at first, but it ain't as becoming in a woman as it is in a man. I don't know why, but it ain't. Well, fire away. What did you do?”