I knew that my companion felt no need of food or drink, and the thin striped body seemed indifferent to heat or cold, and while I had held her hand, and shared her vitality, the call for food had been dormant in myself also. But I had fought out this last struggle unaided, and it was long since I had eaten, though I had drunk deeply at a spring on the hillside as the dusk was falling. “Your foot is hurt,” she thought, “can we mend it?” I took off the boot--what was left of it--and pulled away the remains of a clotted sock, but it was too dark for me to see the wound. With a feeling of relief unspeakable, I knew that the small webbed fingers were on it, with a vitality that thudded through the whole of my exhausted body. She said, “The javelin must have struck aslant, across the front of the foot, and entered where the string held the boot together. It did not cut deeply enough to keep its place, and must have fallen as the foot moved. I think it will heal quite easily. I suppose you are of a kind that grows again without difficulty. I know among the sea-creatures that the lower the form of the body the more easily it unites or grows, if it be torn or shredded. May I clean and close it?” I know it was done very delicately, and the wound was trivial. A small furred finger cleaned and searched it, so that it began to bleed freshly. “I am going to tear a little skin from its sides, because it is so unclean. Do you mind?” she asked. Of course, I assented. It felt to me that it was more than a little. I think the vitality that her hand gave made the pain greater. “If you slept,” she suggested, “and I kept my hand here, I think it would be well in a short time, and your body would be fit for use. It is no good to us now.” I have noticed among my kind, that there is nothing that draws us together so intimately as the common sharing of any physical danger; perhaps it was from this cause in part, perhaps in part that the method of our communication established an intimacy of a kind of which--however commonplace to her--I had no previous experience, perhaps, also, that the very difference of our minds attracted me, but, from whatever cause, I was aware of an attachment to this creature, who, I told myself, was less like a man than a seal, and had no sex as we understand it, such as I had never felt for any earthly woman. As I lay there, at the gate of sleep, the slim webbed hand that pressed my foot was the dearest thing that any world contained, and half-a-million years had no power to divide us. And then--for one incautious instant--she let me see her mind, and I knew how she regarded me.