These aches were the result of exhaustion rather than of his wound; but he did not know this, nor did Jacqueline. The literary imagination pictured him in the last stages of blood-poison, and groans became more frequent. He could have found no surer way of appealing to Jacqueline's tenderness. She was one of the women to whom weakness is a thing irresistible. Her moment of ugly doubt when her lover showed panic under fire had passed instantly with a realization of his dependence upon her. To give is the instinct of such natures, maternal in their very essence. The fact that Channing seemed to need her had always been his chief hold on her fancy. She walked beside him most of the way, leading her mule, so that she might hold his hand; yearning over him, suffering far more than he suffered, crooning tender words of encouragement. "I wish," she said once, passionately, "that you were littler, that you were small enough to carry in my arms, so that _nothing_ could hurt you!"--a sentiment which drew a glance of sympathy from even the stolid young mountaineer at the mule's head, and which set old Brother Bates to thinking wistfully of the long, long road that lay between him and the ministrations of his wife, Sally. But the author was too far gone in anxiety and bone-weariness to care to linger just then in any primrose path of dalliance. He even wished heartily, if inaudibly, that the girl would be quiet and leave him alone. Therefore, the final sight of Jemima and her business-like ambulance was a most welcome one. He demurred politely when he heard where he was to be taken. "I ought not to impose on your mother's hospitality! Couldn't you get me to Farwell's house?" "And who would take care of you there--men-servants? Nonsense!" said Jemima, briskly. "Mother wouldn't hear of it, and neither would I. Don't talk now. Just drink your coffee." (She had brought it hot in a thermos bottle.) "And thank your stars you weren't killed outright in those wild mountains. What an expedition!--feckless Jacky, that dreamer Philip, and a mad peddler! It never would have happened if I'd been at home.--Get up in front with the driver, Jack." But this usurpation of her rights and privileges was more than the younger one could bear. "Feckless I may be, Jemmy Kildare," she cried hotly, "but it was me who defended Mr. Channing from bears and things, me who helped with the operation, me who brought him home all by myself! And it's me he wants now--don't you, dear? Sit up in front yourself, smarty!" Jemima obeyed, lifting astonished eyebrows. All the way to Storm her eyebrows fluttered up and down like flags in a gale of wind. She listened with straining ears to certain whisperings behind her; to certain silences more pregnant than whispering. "So-o!" she thought. "_That's_ what the child is up to! Calling him 'dear!' _That's_ why she wouldn't go visiting.--Have mother and I been blind?" CHAPTER XXXI