She was moaning now a little to herself. She crept to John Bruce and stared into his face. Dying! They were letting this man die. She tried to readjust the cloths upon the wound. She heard Doctor Crang laugh at her again. It seemed as though her soul were sinking into some great bottomless abyss that was black with horror. She did not know this John Bruce. She had told Doctor Crang so. It was useless to repeat it, useless to argue with a drug-steeped brain. There was only one thing that was absolute and final, and that was that a man's life was ebbing away, and a fiend, an inhuman fiend who could save him, but whom pleading would not touch, stood callously by, not wholly indifferent, rather gloating over what took the form of triumph in his diseased mind. And then suddenly she seemed so tired and weary. And she tried to pray to God. And tears came, and on her knees she turned and flung out her arms imploringly to the unkempt figure that stood over her, and who smiled as no other man she had ever seen had smiled before. “For the pity of God, for anything you have ever known in your life that was pure and sacred,” she said brokenly, “save this man.” He looked at her for a moment, still with that sardonic smile upon his lips, and then, swift in its transition, his expression changed and cunning was in his eyes. “What would you give?” he purred. “Give?” She did not look up. She felt a sudden surge of relief. It debased the man the more, for it was evidently money now; but her father would supply that. She had only to ask for it. “What do you want?” she asked eagerly. “Yourself,” said Doctor Crang. She looked up now, quickly, startled; read the lurking triumph in his eyes, and with a sudden cry of fear turned away her head. “My--myself!” Her lips scarcely moved. “Yes, my dear! Yourself--Claire!” Doctor Crang shrugged his shoulders. “Edinburgh, London, Vienna, Paris, degrees from everywhere--ha, ha!--am I a high-priced man? Well, then, why don't you dismiss me? You called me in! That is my price--or shall we call it fee? Promise to marry me, Claire, and I'll save that man.” Her face had lost all vestige of color. She stood and looked at him, but it did not seem as though she any longer had control over her limbs. She did not seem able to move them. They were numbed; her brain was mercifully numbed--there was only a sense of impending horror, without that horror taking concrete form. A voice came to her as though from some great distance: “Don't take too long to make up your mind. There isn't much time. It's about touch and go with him now.”