supper.
Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly: he was not hungry;
if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would
come to disturb him, it was all he would ask. He tried to say it
crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent--dissembling
again. But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had
lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.

"You are not so well this evening," she said softly, laying a cool palm
on his forehead. "I think I'd better telephone Doctor Dillon."

Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious. With pity thus
trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which
months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand. It was a
fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain--the lover's ability
to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless
irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say: "No; I don't
want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone. Please latch the door
when you go out, and tell father and his--and Mrs. Blount that I don't
want to be disturbed."

She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount
sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the
little brutality. But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim
determination which had prompted the brutality. The dusk was thickening,
and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of
radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the
splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which
he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to
subside.

The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let
himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the
outside. Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself
up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.

Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes,
he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote
stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor.
Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the
rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the
revolving doors. More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed
shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding
hat-brim