It was as if her grieving words called him back from lifelessness, for he moaned, sighed deeply, and by a violent struggle turned himself on his side with his face toward her. He opened his eyes and looked inquiringly at her for a time, then he closed them with a weak, tremulous motion of the lids. She clasped his head in her arms, and summoning all her strength, lifted it upon her lap. The blood was beginning to ooze through his saturated clothes and trickle on the ground beside him. It almost crazed her to see this, but she was as powerless as a child to help him. She could but bend over him, and, brushing the dark heavy hair back from his forehead, where cold beads of sweat had risen, kiss him again and again in the ecstasy of her excitement. He was not unconscious now, but he was limp and nerveless, his immense vitality slowly gathering itself for the effort to recover equilibrium. Faint almost unto death as he was, he felt the thrill her kisses sent throughout his frame, and he did not note the pain of his ugly wound. "Oh, you must not die, you must not die!" she wailed, in a sobbing voice. "Open your eyes for my sake, John--for my sake, do you hear, for I love you so!" He heard every word, but he could not open his eyes or move his lips, though slowly and surely his strength was coming back, despite the rapid loss of blood. The pistol ball was a very large one and it had made a bad, almost fatal wound, having passed through his shoulder and a part of his chest, barely missing the lung. The shock had had a paralyzing effect, causing the insensibility from which he was rallying. It was a striking picture they made grouped against the dark back-ground of the old wall, with the dim light falling over them. If a broken spear and a cloven helmet had rested hard by, it would have served well for a tableau of medieval days, a lady nursing the head of her fallen knight within the crumbling ruins of some battered castle. "Why _did_ we ever come here! Oh, love, my own love, open your eyes! Speak to me: say you will not die, you will not die!" Her words, so insistent, so despairing and so passionate, filled his consciousness with an all-satisfying sense of happiness. He could scarcely understand why she should not be willing to let him lie quietly and listen to her, for he had not recovered himself sufficiently to be able to grasp the reality of her suffering or of his own condition. "Speak to me, speak to me," she kept reiterating, until at last, like one freeing himself reluctantly from a sweet dream, he moved his lips, making no sound at first, but presently saying: "Where are you, Agnes?" His voice was so strange and so low that she could not catch his words. She bowed her head so that her face almost touched his. "What is it--what did you say?" she tenderly asked. He put up his left hand and swept it over her cheek and down along her shoulder. Then, as his wound began to pain him, he groaned in a suppressed way.