"... I didn't intend it, Abe," the man muttered. "... I was thinkin' about somethin' else."
When Bayard returned to the Manzanita House, he ran up the stairs with an eagerness that was not in the least inspired by a desire to return to his watching over the man he had chosen to succor. He strode down the hallway and into the room with his keen anticipation thinly disguised by a sham concern. And within the doorway he halted abruptly, for the woman who had helped him, whose presence there had brought him back from his horse on a run, sat at the bedside with her hands limp in her lap and about her bearing an air that quite staggered him. Her face was as nearly expressionless as a human countenance can become. It was as if something had occurred which had taken from her all emotion, all ability to respond to any mental or sensory influence. For the moment, she was crushed, and so completely that even her reflexes did not react to the horror of the revelation. She did not look at Bayard, did not move; she might have been without the sense of sight or hearing; she did not even breathe perceptibly; just sat there with a fixity that frightened him.
"Why, Miss!" he cried in confused alarm. "I ... I wouldn't left you--"
She roused on his cry and shook her head, and he thought she wanted him to stop, so he stood there through an awkward moment, waiting for her to say more.
"Course, it was too much for you!" he concluded aloud, self-reproachfully, when she did not speak. "You're tired; this ... this takin' care of this booze-soaked carcass was too much to ask of you. I--"
"Don't," she said, in a dry, flat voice, looking up at him appealingly, mastering her voice with a heroic effort. "Don't, please! This.... This booze-soaked ... carcass ...
The words with which she ended came in a listless whisper; she made no further sound, and the hissing of Bayard's breath, as it slipped out between his teeth, was audible.
All that he had said against that other man came back to him, all the epithets he had used, all the pains he had taken to impress on this woman, his wife, a sense of the utter degradation, the vileness, of Ned Lytton. For the instant, he was filled with regret because of his rash speech; the next, he was overwhelmed by realizing that all he had said was true and that he had been justified in saying those things of this woman's husband. The thought unpoised him.