eard a sound behind me. It
was a long breath, quite audible, that ended in a groan. I gripped the
parapet and listened, while my heart pounded, and in a minute it came
again.

I was terribly frightened. Then--I don't know how I did it, but I was
across the roof, kneeling beside the tent, where it stood against
the chimney. And there, lying prone among the flower pots, and almost
entirely hidden, lay the man we had been looking for.

His head was toward me, and I reached out shakingly and touched his
face. It was cold, and my hand, when I drew it back, was covered with
blood.

Chapter XXII. IT WAS DELIRIUM

I was sure he was dead. He did not move, and when I caught his hands and
called him frantically, he did not hear me. And so, with the horror over
me, I half fell down the stairs and roused Jim in the studio.

They all came with lights and blankets, and they carried him into the
tent and put him on the couch and tried to put whisky in his mouth. But
he could not swallow. And the silence became more and more ominous until
finally Anne got hysterical and cried, "He is dead! Dead!" and collapsed
on the roof.

But he was not. Just as the lights in the tent began to have red rings
around them and Jim's voice came from away across the river, somebody
said, "There, he swallowed that," and soon after, he opened his eyes. He
muttered something that sounded like "Andean pinnacle" and lapsed into
unconsciousness again. But he was not dead! He was not dead!

When the doctor came they made a stretcher out of one of Jim's six-foot
canvases--it had a picture on it, and Jim was angry enough the next
day--and took him down to the studio. We made it as much like a
sick-room as we could, and we tried to make him comfortable. But he lay
without opening his eyes, and at dawn the doctor brought a consultant
and a trained nurse.

The nurse was an offensively capable person. She put us all out, and
scolded Anne for lighting Japanese incense in the room--although Anne
explained that it is very reviving. And she said that it was unnecessary
to have a dozen people breathing up all the oxygen and asphyxiating
the patient. She was good-looking, too. I disliked her at once. Any
one could see by the way she took his pulse--just letting his poor hand
hang, without any support--that she was a purely mechanical creature,
without heart.

Well, as I said before, she put us all out, and shut the door, and asked
us not to whisper outside. T