"It excites you! Your temperature
is rising."
He ignored her altogether.
"Listen," he said to me, "why they have let you come here I cannot tell!
You know that I am in prison--that I am not likely to leave here alive!"
"I don't think that it is so bad as that," I assured him.
"It is worse! I am likely to die without the chance of finishing--my
work. Great things will die with me. God knows what will happen."
"You have a doctor and a hospital nurse," I remarked. "That doesn't look
as though they meant you to die!"
"You don't know who I am, and you don't know who they are," he answered,
dropping his voice almost to a whisper.
"I want a month, one more month, and I might cheat them yet!"
"I don't think that they mean you to die," I said. "They have an idea
that you are in possession of some marvellous secret. They want to get
possession of that first."
"They persevere," he murmured. "In Paris--but never mind. They know very
well that that secret, if I die before I can finish my work, dies with
me, or--"
The nurse, who had left us a few moments before, re-entered the room.
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