Then, being only a woman, and weak and hungry and tired, and tried beyond her endurance, she took three evading, half-staggering steps toward Durkin, and fell in a faint over his feet. The door opened and closed softly; and a figure with an ashen face, blotched with claret-color, slunk into the silent room. Night had closed in by this time, so having listened for a reassuring second or two, he groped slowly across the bare floor. His trembling hand felt a woman’s skirt. Exploring carefully upward, he felt her limp arm, and her face and hair. Then he came to the figure he was in search of. He ripped open the wet and soggy coat with a deft little pull at the buttons, and thrust a great hungry hand down into the inside breast pocket. The exploring fat fingers found what they were in search of, and held the carefully banded packet up to the uncertain light of the window. There he tested the edges of the crisp parchment of the bank-notes, and apparently satisfied, hurriedly thrust them down into his own capacious hip-pocket. Then he crept to the broken door and listened for a minute or two. He opened it cautiously, at last, tip-toed slowly over to the stair-balustrade, and finally turned back and closed the door. As the latch of the shattered lock fell rattling on the floor a sigh quavered through the room. It was a woman’s sigh, wavering and weak and freighted with weariness, but one of returning consciousness. For, a minute later, a voice was asking, plaintively and emptily, “Where am I?” CHAPTER XXVII Often, in looking back on those terrible, phantasmal days that followed, Frances Candler wondered how she had lived through them. Certain disjointed pictures of the first night and day remained vividly in her memory; unimportant and inconsequential episodes haunted her mind, as graphic and yet as vaguely unrelated as the midday recollection of a night of broken sleep and dream. One of these memories was the doctor’s hurried question as to whether or not she could stand the sight of a little blood. A second memory was Durkin’s childlike cry of anguish, as she held the bared arm over the sheet of white oilcloth, pungent-odored with its disinfectant. Still another memory was that of the rattle of the little blackened bullet on the floor as it dropped from the jaws of the surgical forceps. A more vague and yet a more pleasing memory was the thought that had come to her, when the wound had been washed and dressed and hidden away under its white bandages, and Durkin himself had been made comfortable on the narrow couch, that the worst was then over, that the damage had been repaired, and that a week or two of quiet and careful nursing would make everything right again.