"Your face, all tears and sorrow and sweetness," said Brian stubbornly, "etched itself on my memory the night Don ran away."
"I know now that all I did that night I did for you. Don swore at you--remember?"
The flower-like face in the purple cloud saddened. Brian distinctly heard the crackle of the camp fire.
"I said I would help him, yes, but I wrote and I made Don write because I could not bear to have you hurt and worried. And even at the quarry, when I was keen to be off to Whitaker, I saw your face in the mist, urging me to stay--to stay and help Don. And I did--for you. I know that all these things I did for you. I _know_!"
But again he was staring at a pansy and the cloud of purple floated hazily away. Tired, ill and aeons old, Brian opened his eyes.
"I'm glad you're awake," said Joan gently. "You were dreaming. Drugs frighten me."
"Nothing was clear," said Brian, touching his forehead, "but the pansy and you. And purple--like that." He pointed to her ring. "What an odd ring it is, Joan! Wistaria?"
"Wistaria on a ladder. It's the ring Kenny gave me."
Brian's startled eyes met and held her own. "Why?" he asked.
"I'm going to marry him. Didn't you know?"
April with its tender flame of green brought lagging days of worry. Brian, said Kenny wistfully, was just--not Brian. He was an irritable convalescent in a plaster cast, too nervous to be patient. His pain had been intense, the shock disastrous to his self-control. The haggard mark of it upon his face Don read with scalding heart and brooded. When after a refractory week of undisciplined nerves and temper that strained the doctor's endurance to the breaking point, Brian went out of his head for forty-eight hours and babbled like a madman about a face in the mist, Kenny in terror wired for Frank Barrington. Brian, he thought, must be frantic with pain.
Frank came, mystified and apprehensive. He found a white and apathetic patient who, with his delirium gone, denied abnormal pain.
"It isn't pain," Frank reported. "Of that I'm convinced. His head's in excellent condition and his danger of lameness is at an end. Though he resented the suggestion, I think there's something on his mind. And whatever it is, he's much too shattered nervously to give it a normal valuation."