. His voice burst out of
him with almost its normal force.

"Yes, Bertram. A great deal."

"And I thank you. It was bully work. I don't see how you stood it,
holding me up the way you did--it ought to have killed off a man, let
alone a girl. Didn't hurt you anywhere, did it?"

"No--who told you?" Her voice was hard and constrained.

Now Bertram smiled. It was different, this smile, from the old
illumination of his features. She could not tell, in the moment she
had to think, whether it was his illness that changed it so, or
whether it really held a bitterness which, superficially, she read
into it.

"That's the answer," he said enigmatically. "You didn't know I was
onto everything, did you? I never went out but once--just after the
crash when the car turned over. I began to know things while they were
carrying me up the bank. From that time, I was just like a man with
his wind knocked out. It didn't hurt much, but I couldn't move a
finger or a toe. I didn't want to move if I could. I was too busy just
keeping alive. I couldn't open my eyes, but I heard everything. You
just bet I heard everything!"

This descent of the conversation into reminiscence and apparent
commonplace gave Eleanor an opening into which she leaped. It was
wonderful; she had read of such cases. Had he heard that child crying
in the corner, and had it bothered him? Had he been conscious that it
was Mark Heath and none other who was asking so many questions? Mark
Heath had done so much for them--she would tell him about it some
other time. But Bertram still lay there with his frown of a petulant
boy on his face, and her voice ran down into nothing for lack of
sympathy in her listener.

"Do you remember all you said?" he asked when she was quite silent.

"I think so--why?" The question had brought a little, warm jump of her
nerves.

"Everything? Something you said to me?"

"I think so, Bertram."

"Did I dream it, then?"

She made no answer to this, but her knees failed under her so that she
sat down on the bed. Had she--had she said it aloud?

"Something like this: 'Bertram, we don't belong to each other'?" He
laughed a little on this; even a certain blitheness came into his
laugh, as though he should say, "the joke is on you."

A sense of the shock she might give him moved her to temporize.

"Let us not talk of it now, Bertram. Let it be as it was until you're
better."

"I'll be a blame sight better after I get this off my system.