Cuff told RoBards afterward that Miss Patty, instead of fainting at the sight of Chalender’s blood, sprang to the ground across the wheel and ran to him like a fury, slashing at the laborers with her fingernails. The workmen were aghast enough at the white victim they had unwittingly laid low, and they lifted him from the ditch. Patty dropped to the heap of fresh soil and took his bleeding form into her arms, tore away his shirt and with desperate immodesty made bandages of her own white pantaloons and stenched the gouts of red. Then she ordered that Chalender be picked up and placed in her own carry-all. And she brought him home with her. When RoBards came up from New York, Cuff told him the story before he reached the house. On the doorsill Patty confronted him with white defiance. She waited for him to speak. She dared him to speak. What could he say? She had saved the life of a wounded man. She had brought home a dying friend. The Good Samaritan had done no more and no less. RoBards could have wished the victim had been anyone else in the world, but he could hardly have wished his wife unequal to such a crisis. She stood waiting for him, grim, wan, her nostrils wide and taut, her lips thin and tight, her eyes ransacking his very soul. And so he said: “You are wonderful!” And then she broke down across the arm he thrust out to catch her; and she wept upon his heart, caressing his cheek with stroking hands, while she sobbed: “I love you. You are so sweet. Poor Harry, I thought they had killed him! He was so stupid! But you are so sweet!” And never was word bitterer in a man’s ears than that reiterated “sweet.” CHAPTER XII Fiends of suspicion laughed at the tenderness in RoBards’ heart as he upheld his wife. The fiends called it “complacency.” Fiends of irony mocked that complacency and told him that it was not lofty idealism or even consideration for her that withheld his wrath, but only a voluptuous unwillingness to surrender the possession of her pretty form. But whatever his true motives, he was more helpless than Chalender, where he found him prone on a couch in the library, biting on a mouthful of tufted quilt and stuffing it down his throat to stifle his howls of pain as the country doctor swabbed with a coarse towel the dirty red channel in his back. Chalender rolled his eyes up whitely at RoBards from the pit of hell, and then his gaunt face turned into snowflake marble as his head fell forward and he fainted. All that night RoBards acted as nurse for him, and forgiveness bled from him for any real or imagined injury he had received from Chalender. Hating the man as he did and believing that Chalender had seduced his wife’s interest and perhaps her very honor, he could not but feel that the wretch was doing penance enough.