Bring me a syringe. If you haven't one, run from house
to house till you get one. Her life depends on it." By this time he was
shouting after the hurrying landlady.

In a minute or two she returned.

"Have you got the syringe?" he cried, the moment he heard her step.

To his great relief she had. He told her to wash it out thoroughly with
the hot water, unscrew the top, and take out the piston. While giving
his directions, he unbound the arm, enlarged the wound in the vein
longitudinally, and re-bound the arm tight below the elbow, then quickly
opened a vein of his own, and held the syringe to catch the spout that
followed. When it was full, he replaced the piston, telling Mrs.
Puckridge to put her thumb on his wound, turned the point of the syringe
up and drove a little out to get rid of the air, then, with the help of
a probe, inserted the nozzle into the wound, and gently forced in the
blood. That done, he placed his own thumbs on the two wounds, and made
the woman wash out the syringe in clean hot water. Then he filled it as
before, and again forced its contents into the lady's arm. This process
he went through repeatedly. Then, listening, he found her heart beating
quite perceptibly, though irregularly. Her breath was faintly coming and
going. Several times more he repeated the strange dose, then ceased, and
was occupied in binding up her arm, when she gave a great shuddering
sigh. By the time he had finished, the pulse was perceptible at her
wrist. Last of all he bound up his own wound, from which had escaped a
good deal beyond what he had used. While thus occupied, he turned sick,
and lay down on the floor. Presently, however, he grew able to crawl
from the room, and got into the garden at the back of the house, where
he walked softly to the little rude arbor at the end of it, and sat down
as if in a dream. But in the dream his soul felt wondrously awake. He
had been tasting death from the same cup with the beautiful woman who
lay there, coming alive with his life. A terrible weight was heaved from
his bosom. If she had died, he would have felt, all his life long, that
he had sent one of the loveliest of Nature's living dreams back to the
darkness and the worm, long years before her time, and with the foam of
the cup of life yet on her lips. Then a horror seized him at the
presumptuousness of the liberty he had taken. What if the beautiful
creature would rather have died than have the blood of a man, one she
ne