The Mission of Poubalov — page 233: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

POUBALOV SUCCEEDS. 229 _ The old man choked, pawed with both palsied hands at his collar and would have fallen from the bed if Poubalov had not turned hastily from Clara and caught him. Clara shrank away, not terrified but shocked at Dexter’s appear- ance, while Palovna hurried across the room to lend a hand. **He is dying!’’ exclaimed Clara faintly. “No, Miss Hilman, not dying,’’ responded Poubalov quickly, ‘‘but he is a very sick man. ‘Thanks, Paul Paloyna, but I can get on better with him alone. You may zo ahead of me, if you please, and try to find a physi- cian——’’ “TI sawa doctor’s sign near the street corner,’’ inter- rupted Palovna. ‘‘Summon him at once, then,’’ said Poubalov who was bearing old Dexter as tenderly as a nurse might carry a sick child; ‘‘I will await you at the door and,’’ addressing Clara, ‘‘be with you here in a moment if you would hear the hidden history of your troubles.’’ “Better here, sweetheart,’’ whispered Strobel, ‘‘here where I passed my week of death than in any other place !”’ Tt was several minutes before Poubalov returned. He carried Dexter not only to the door but through the street to the physician’s house where medical skill was promptly applied with a view to restoring the miser’s wreck of a body to something like life. If Dexter’s course had run tranquilly he might, perhaps, have lingered like a noxious weed, for a long time upon the earth, but after the com- plex shocks of disappointment, imprisonment and fear, he had thrown the total of his nervous and physical ener- gies into that mad attack upon Clara. There remained, then, but the dregs of his vicious vitality, and these sustained him less than the length of the night. He was still alive but the end was plainly in sight when Poubalov left him to rejoin the lovers. ‘*Miss Hilman,’’ he said the moment he eame in, ‘‘your judgment of me has been marvellously correct. it is trug_ (C(O)