“Doctor!” she screamed, as she heard his steps on the stair. “Doctor! I’m dying, doctor! Are you never coming!” She wondered, in her agony of mind and body, if he would be fool enough not to understand. _Would_ he be fool enough? Doogan’s agents and the three plain-clothes men gathered about her silently, as they saw the intruder hurry in and drop on his knee beside the woman. “Is it you, doctor?” she wailed, with chattering teeth, shaking with an on-coming chill. Durkin, in his dilemma, did not dare to look away from her face. He was blindly trying to grope his way toward what it all meant. The others stood above him, listening, waiting for the least word. One of them moved to the open window, and closed it. He bent lower, trying to read the dumb agony in the woman’s face. Then another of the men went to the door, to guard it. Durkin could see the shoes and trousers-legs of the others, up to the knee. Each pair of boots, he noticed inconsequently, had a character and outline of their own. But still his frantic brain could not find the key to the enigma. Then, out of the chaos and the disorder of the chattering of her teeth, seemed to come a hint, a whisper. She was sounding the double “i” of the operator about to “send”—she was trying to catch his attention, to tell him something, in Morse. He bent still closer, and fumbled artfully with the sleeve, wet and sodden with her warm blood. He read the signal, as she lay there with chattering teeth: “All up—Get away quick—these are police—meet you in London—hotel Cecil—in two months—hurry.” “Where—write?” he implored her, by word of mouth, covering the question by shifting his busily exploring fingers from the wounded left shoulder to the right. She closed her eyes. “C-N,” she answered. She repeated it, in the strange Morse, weakly, and then fainted dead away. Durkin dropped the sleeve he was carefully turning up. He looked at the men about him with a sudden towering, almost drunken madness of relief, a madness which they took for sudden rage. “You fools, you,” he called at them. “You fools, couldn’t you see it—this woman’s dying! Here, you, quick—compress this artery with your thumb—hard, so! You, you—oh, I don’t care _who_ you are—telephone for my instruments—Doctor Hodgson, No. 29 West Thirtieth!”—luckily he remembered a throat doctor Frank had once consulted there—“and get me a sheet off one of the beds, quick!” He tossed his hat into the hall, jerked up his cuffs, almost believing, himself, in the part he was acting. “Water—where’ll I get a water-tap?” he demanded, feverishly, running to the door. Outside the room, he suddenly kicked his hat to the foot of the back-stairs. He caught it as it rebounded from the second step, and bolted noiselessly up the stairway, never turning or looking back until he had gained the roof. There he crept, cat-like, across half-a-dozen houses, and slipped down the first fire-escape that offered.