She slipped through the side trail to the cabin with a choking sensation. She stole to the window and peered in--in the firelight she could see the form on the bunk, tossing and muttering. Otherwise the place was empty. She lifted the latch softly and entered. The strained anxiety of Jessica's look relaxed as she gazed about her. She saw the phial on the table--the doctor had been there, then. If he were in serious case, Prendergast would be with him. She threw back her hood, drew one of the chairs to the side of the bunk and sat down, her eyes fixed on his face. The weakness and helplessness of his posture struck through and through her. Two sides of her were struggling in a chaotic combat for mastery. "I hate you! I hate you!" she said under her breath, clenching her cold hand. "I _must_ hate you! You stole my love and put it under your feet! You have disgraced my present and ruined my future! What if you have forgotten the past--your crime? Does that make you the less guilty, or me the less wretched?" But withal a silent voice within her gave the lie to her vehemence. Some element of her character that had been rigid and intact was crumbling down. An old, sweet something, that a dreadful mill had ground and crushed and annihilated, was rising whole and undefiled, superior to any petty distinction, regardless of all that lifted combative in her inheritance, not to be gainsaid or denied. She leaned closer, listening to the incoherent words and broken phrases borne on the turbid channels of fever. But she could not link them together into meaning. Only one name he spoke clearly over and over again--the name Hugh Stires--repeated with the dreary monotony of a child conning a lesson. She noted the mark across his brow. Before her marriage, in her blindness, she had used to wonder what it was like. It was not in the least disfiguring--it gave a touch of the extraordinary. It was so small she did not wonder that in that ecstatic moment of her bride's kiss she had not seen it. Slowly, half fearfully, she stretched out her hand and laid it on his. As if at the touch the mutterings ceased. The eyes opened, and a confused, troubled look crept to them. Then they closed again, and the look faded out into a peace that remained. Jessica dropped to her knees and buried her face in the blanket, burning and chilling with an indescribable sensation of mingled pain and pleasure. She scarcely knew what she was thinking. It seemed to her that his very weakness and helplessness voiced again the something that had sounded in the music of the violin, when the buried, forgotten past had cried out its pain and shame and plea, half unconsciously--to her! A thrill ran through her, the sense of moral power of the weak over the strong, of the feminine over the masculine. A rising flush stained her cheeks. With a sudden impulse, and with a guilty backward glance, she bent and touched her lips to his forehead.