David looked at her longingly, but he dared not intrude upon her somber
abstraction. The voices in the tent rose and fell. Once at a louder
phrase from Daddy John she turned her head quickly and listened, a
sheaf of strained nerves. The voices dropped again, her eye came back
to the light and touched the young man's face. It contained no
recognition of him, but he leaped at the chance, making stammering
proffer of such aid as he could give.
"I've got you some supper."
He lifted the plate, but she shook her head.
"Let me cook it for you," he pleaded. "You haven't eaten anything
since morning."
"I can't eat," she said, and fell back to her fire-gazing, slipping
away from him into the forbidding dumbness of her thoughts. He could
only watch her, hoping for a word, an expressed wish. When it came it
was, alas! outside his power to gratify:
"If there had only been a doctor here! That was what I was hoping for."
And so when she asked for the help he yearned to give, it was his fate
that he should meet her longing with a hopeless silence.
When Daddy John emerged from the tent she leaped to her feet.
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