See for yourself, Mr. Noel, if it
fits the gap in that dress which your own hands have just taken from
your wife's wardrobe."
She rose and handed him the fragment of stuff across the bed. He put it
into the vacant space in the flounce as well as his trembling fingers
would let him.
"Does it fit, sir?" asked Mrs. Lecount.
The dress dropped from his hands, and the deadly bluish pallor--which
every doctor who attended him had warned his housekeeper to
dread--overspread his face slowly. Mrs. Lecount had not reckoned on
such an answer to her question as she now saw in his cheeks. She hurried
round to him, with the smelling-bottle in her hand. He dropped to his
knees and caught at her dress with the grasp of a drowning man. "Save
me!" he gasped, in a hoarse, breathless whisper. "Oh, Lecount, save me!"
"I promise to save you," said Mrs. Lecount; "I am here with the means
and the resolution to save you. Come away from this place--come nearer
to the air." She raised him as she spoke, and led him across the room
to the window. "Do you feel the chill pain again on your left side?" she
asked, with the first signs of alarm that she had shown yet. "Has your
wife got any eau-de-cologne, any sal-volatile in her room? Don't exhaust
yourself by speaking--point to the place!"
He pointed to a little triangular cupboard of old worm-eaten walnut-wood
fixed high in a corner of the room.
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