K

Even that first evening he had been jealous.

It had been Joe then. Now it was another and older man, daring, intelligent, unscrupulous. And this time he had lost her absolutely, lost her without a struggle to keep her. His only struggle had been with himself, to remember that he had nothing to offer but failure.

“Do you know,” said Sidney suddenly, “that it is almost a year since that night you came up the Street, and I was here on the steps?”

“That’s a fact, isn’t it!” He managed to get some surprise into his voice.

“How Joe objected to your coming! Poor Joe!”

“Do you ever see him?”

“Hardly ever now. I think he hates me.”

“Why?”

“Because—well, you know, K. Why do men always hate a woman who just happens not to love them?”

“I don’t believe they do. It would be much better for them if they could. As a matter of fact, there are poor devils who go through life trying to do that very thing, and failing.”

Sidney’s eyes were on the tall house across. It was Dr. Ed’s evening office hour, and through the open window she could see a line of people waiting their turn. They sat immobile, inert, doggedly patient, until the opening of the back office door promoted them all one chair toward the consulting-room.

“I shall be just across the Street,” she said at last. “Nearer than I am at the hospital.”

“You will be much farther away. You will be married.”

“But we will still be friends, K.?”

Her voice was anxious, a little puzzled. She was often puzzled with him.

“Of course.”

But, after another silence, he astounded her. She had fallen into the way of thinking of him as always belonging to the house, even, in a sense, belonging to her. And now—

“Shall you mind very much if I tell you that I am thinking of going away?”

“K.!”

“My dear child, you do not need a roomer here any more. I have always received infinitely more than I have paid for, even in the small services I have been able to render. Your Aunt Harriet is prosperous. You are away, and some day you are going to be married. Don’t you see—I am not needed?”

“That does not mean you are not wanted.”

“I shall not go far. I’ll always be near enough, so that I can see you”—he changed this hastily—“so that we can still meet and talk things over. Old friends ought to be like that, not too near, but to be turned on when needed, like a tap.”

“Where will you go?”

“The Rosenfelds are rather in straits. I thought of helping them to get a small house somewhere and of taking a room with them. It’s largely a matter of furniture. If they could furnish it even plainly, it could be done. I—haven’t saved anything.”

“Do you ever think of yourself?” she cried. “Have you always gone through life helping people, K.? Save anything! I should think not! You spend it all on others.” She bent over and put her hand on his shoulder. “It will not be home without you, K.”

To save him, he could not have spoken just then. A riot of rebellion surged up in him, that he must let this best thing in his life go out of it. To go empty of heart through the rest of his days, while his very arms ached to hold her! And she was so near—just above, with her hand on his shoulder, her wistful face so close that, without moving, he could have brushed her hair.

“You have not wished me happiness, K. Do you remember, when I was going to the hospital and you gave me the little watch—do you remember what you said?”

“Yes”—huskily.

“Will you say it again?”

“But that was good-bye.”

“Isn’t this, in a way? You are going to leave us, and I—say it, K.”

“Good-bye, dear, and—God bless you.”

CHAPTER XXIII

The announcement of Sidney’s engagement was not to be made for a year. Wilson, chafing under the delay, was obliged to admit to himself that it was best. Many things could happen in a year. Carlotta would have finished her training, and by that time would probably be reconciled to the ending of their relationship.

He intended to end that. He had meant every word of what he had sworn to Sidney. He was genuinely in love, even unselfishly—as far as he could be unselfish. The secret was to be carefully kept also for Sidney’s sake. The hospital did not approve of engagements between nurses and the staff. It was disorganizing, bad for discipline.

Sidney was very happy all that summer. She glowed with pride when her lover put through a difficult piece of work; flushed and palpitated when she heard his praises sung; grew to know, by a sort of intuition, when he was in the house. She wore his ring on a fine chain around her neck, and grew prettier every day.

Once or twice, however, when she was at home, away from the glamour, her early fears obsessed her. Would he always love her? He was so handsome and so gifted, and there were women who were mad about him. That was the gossip of the hospital. Suppose she married him and he tired of her? In her humility she thought that perhaps only her youth, and such charm as she had that belonged to youth, held him. And before her, always, she saw the tragic women of the wards.

K. had postponed his leaving until fall. Sidney had been insistent, and Harriet had topped the argument in her businesslike way. “If you insist on being an idiot and adopting the Rosenfeld family,” she said, “wait until September. The season for boarders doesn’t begin until fall.”

So K. waited for “the season,” and ate his heart out for Sidney in the interval.

Johnny Rosenfeld still lay in his ward, inert from the waist down. K. was his most frequent visitor. As a matter of fact, he was watching the boy closely, at Max Wilson’s request.

“Tell me when I’m to do it,” said Wilson, “and when the time comes, for God’s sake, stand by me. Come to the operation. He’s got so much confidence that I’ll help him that I don’t dare to fail.”

So K. came on visiting days, and, by special dispensation, on Saturday afternoons. He was teaching the boy basket-making. Not that he knew anything about it himself; but, by means of a blind teacher, he kept just one lesson ahead. The ward was intensely interested. It found something absurd and rather touching in this tall, serious young man with the surprisingly deft fingers, tying raffia knots.

The first basket went, by Johnny’s request, to Sidney Page.

“I want her to have it,” he said. “She got corns on her fingers from rubbing me when I came in first; and, besides—”

“Yes?” said K. He was tying a most complicated knot, and could not look up.

“I know something,” said Johnny. “I’m not going to get in wrong by talking, but I know something. You give her the basket.”

K. looked up then, and surprised Johnny’s secret in his face.

“Ah!” he said.

“If I’d squealed she’d have finished me for good. They’ve got me, you know. I’m not running in 2.40 these days.”

“I’ll not tell, or make it uncomfortable for you. What do you know?”

Johnny looked around. The ward was in the somnolence of mid-afternoon. The nearest patient, a man in a wheel-chair, was snoring heavily.

“It was the dark-eyed one that changed the medicine on me,” he said. “The one with the heels that were always tapping around, waking me up. She did it; I saw her.”

After all, it was only what K. had suspected before. But a sense of impending danger to Sidney obsessed him. If Carlotta would do that, what would she do when she learned of the engagement? And he had known her before. He believed she was totally unscrupulous. The odd coincidence of their paths crossing again troubled him.

Carlotta Harrison was well again, and back on duty. Luckily for Sidney, her three months’ service in the operating-room kept them apart. For Carlotta was now not merely jealous. She found herself neglected, ignored. It ate her like a fever.

But she did not yet suspect an engagement. It had been her theory that Wilson would not marry easily—that, in a sense, he would have to be coerced into marriage. Some clever woman would marry him some day, and no one would be more astonished than himself. She thought merely that Sidney was playing a game like her own, with different weapons. So she planned her battle, ignorant that she had lost already.

Her method was simple enough. She stopped sulking, met Max with smiles, made no overtures toward a renewal of their relations. At first this annoyed him. Later it piqued him. To desert a woman was justifiable, under certain circumstances. But to desert a woman, and have her apparently not even know it, was against the rules of the game.

During a surgical dressing in a private room, one day, he allowed his fingers to touch hers, as on that day a year before when she had taken Miss Simpson’s place in his office. He was rewarded by the same slow, smouldering glance that had caught his attention before. So she was only acting indifference!

Then Carlotta made her second move. A new interne had come into the house, and was going through the process of learning that from a senior at the medical school to a half-baked junior interne is a long step back. He had to endure the good-humored contempt of the older men, the patronizing instructions of nurses as to rules.

Carlotta alone treated him with deference. His uneasy rounds in Carlotta’s precinct took on the state and form of staff visitations. She flattered, cajoled, looked up to him.

After a time it dawned on Wilson that this junior cub was getting more attention than himself: that, wherever he happened to be, somewhere in the offing would be Carlotta and the Lamb, the latter eyeing her with worship. Her indifference had only piqued him. The enthroning of a successor galled him. Between them, the Lamb suffered mightily—was subject to frequent “bawling out,” as he termed it, in the operating-room as he assisted the anaesthetist. He took his troubles to Carlotta, who soothed him in the corridor—in plain sight of her quarry, of course—by putting a sympathetic hand on his sleeve.

Then, one day, Wilson was goaded to speech.

“For the love of Heaven, Carlotta,” he said impatiently, “stop making love to that wretched boy. He wriggles like a worm if you look at him.”

“I like him. He is thoroughly genuine. I respect him, and—he respects me.”

“It’s rather a silly game, you know.”

“What game?”

“Do you think I don’t understand?”

“Perhaps you do. I—I don’t really care a lot about him, Max. But I’ve been down-hearted. He cheers me up.”

Her attraction for him was almost gone—not quite. He felt rather sorry for her.

“I’m sorry. Then you are not angry with me?”

“Angry? No.” She lifted her eyes to his, and for once she was not acting. “I knew it would end, of course. I have lost a—a lover. I expected that. But I wanted to keep a friend.”

It was the right note. Why, after all, should he not be her friend? He had treated her cruelly, hideously. If she still desired his friendship, there was no disloyalty to Sidney in giving it. And Carlotta was very careful. Not once again did she allow him to see what lay in her eyes. She told him of her worries. Her training was almost over. She had a chance to take up institutional work. She abhorred the thought of private duty. What would he advise?

The Lamb was hovering near, hot eyes on them both. It was no place to talk.

“Come to the office and we’ll talk it over.”

“I don’t like to go there; Miss Simpson is suspicious.”

The institution she spoke of was in another city. It occurred to Wilson that if she took it the affair would have reached a graceful and legitimate end.

Also, the thought of another stolen evening alone with her was not unpleasant. It would be the last, he promised himself. After all, it was owing to her. He had treated her badly.

Sidney would be at a lecture that night. The evening loomed temptingly free.

“Suppose you meet me at the old corner,” he said carelessly, eyes on the Lamb, who was forgetting that he was only a junior interne and was glaring ferociously. “We’ll run out into the country and talk things over.”

She demurred, with her heart beating triumphantly.

“What’s the use of going back to that? It’s over, isn’t it?”

Her objection made him determined. When at last she had yielded, and he made his way down to the smoking-room, it was with the feeling that he had won a victory.

K. had been uneasy all that day; his ledgers irritated him. He had been sleeping badly since Sidney’s announcement of her engagement. At five o’clock, when he left the office, he found Joe Drummond waiting outside on the pavement.

“Mother said you’d been up to see me a couple of times. I thought I’d come around.”

K. looked at his watch.

“What do you say to a walk?”

“Not out in the country. I’m not as muscular as you are. I’ll go about town for a half-hour or so.”

Thus forestalled, K. found his subject hard to lead up to. But here again Joe met him more than halfway.

“Well, go on,” he said, when they found themselves in the park; “I don’t suppose you were paying a call.”

“No.”

“I guess I know what you are going to say.”

“I’m not going to preach, if you’re expecting that. Ordinarily, if a man insists on making a fool of himself, I let him alone.”

“Why make an exception of me?”

“One reason is that I happen to like you. The other reason is that, whether you admit it or not, you are acting like a young idiot, and are putting the responsibility on the shoulders of some one else.”

“She is responsible, isn’t she?”

“Not in the least. How old are you, Joe?”

“Twenty-three, almost.”

“Exactly. You are a man, and you are acting like a bad boy. It’s a disappointment to me. It’s more than that to Sidney.”

“Much she cares! She’s going to marry Wilson, isn’t she?”

“There is no announcement of any engagement.”

“She is, and you know it. Well, she’ll be happy—not! If I’d go to her tonight and tell her what I know, she’d never see him again.” The idea, thus born in his overwrought brain, obsessed him. He returned to it again and again. Le Moyne was uneasy. He was not certain that the boy’s statement had any basis in fact. His single determination was to save Sidney from any pain.

When Joe suddenly announced his inclination to go out into the country after all, he suspected a ruse to get rid of him, and insisted on going along. Joe consented grudgingly.

“Car’s at Bailey’s garage,” he said sullenly. “I don’t know when I’ll get back.”

“That won’t matter.” K.‘s tone was cheerful. “I’m not sleeping, anyhow.”

That passed unnoticed until they were on the highroad, with the car running smoothly between yellowing fields of wheat. Then:—

“So you’ve got it too!” he said. “We’re a fine pair of fools. We’d both be better off if I sent the car over a bank.”

He gave the wheel a reckless twist, and Le Moyne called him to time sternly.

They had supper at the White Springs Hotel—not on the terrace, but in the little room where Carlotta and Wilson had taken their first meal together. K. ordered beer for them both, and Joe submitted with bad grace.

But the meal cheered and steadied him. K. found him more amenable to reason, and, gaining his confidence, learned of his desire to leave the city.

“I’m stuck here,” he said. “I’m the only one, and mother yells blue murder when I talk about it. I want to go to Cuba. My uncle owns a farm down there.”

“Perhaps I can talk your mother over. I’ve been there.”

Joe was all interest. His dilated pupils became more normal, his restless hands grew quiet. K.‘s even voice, the picture he drew of life on the island, the stillness of the little hotel in its mid-week dullness, seemed to quiet the boy’s tortured nerves. He was nearer to peace than he had been for many days. But he smoked incessantly, lighting one cigarette from another.

At ten o’clock he left K. and went for the car. He paused for a moment, rather sheepishly, by K.‘s chair.

“I’m feeling a lot better,” he said. “I haven’t got the band around my head. You talk to mother.”

That was the last K. saw of Joe Drummond until the next day.

CHAPTER XXIV

Carlotta dressed herself with unusual care—not in black this time, but in white. She coiled her yellow hair in a soft knot at the back of her head, and she resorted to the faintest shading of rouge. She intended to be gay, cheerful. The ride was to be a bright spot in Wilson’s memory. He expected recriminations; she meant to make him happy. That was the secret of the charm some women had for men. They went to such women to forget their troubles. She set the hour of their meeting at nine, when the late dusk of summer had fallen; and she met him then, smiling, a faintly perfumed white figure, slim and young, with a thrill in her voice that was only half assumed.

“It’s very late,” he complained. “Surely you are not going to be back at ten.”

“I have special permission to be out late.”

“Good!” And then, recollecting their new situation: “We have a lot to talk over. It will take time.”

At the White Springs Hotel they stopped to fill the gasolene tank of the car. Joe Drummond saw Wilson there, in the sheet-iron garage alongside of the road. The Wilson car was in the shadow. It did not occur to Joe that the white figure in the car was not Sidney. He went rather white, and stepped out of the zone of light. The influence of Le Moyne was still on him, however, and he went on quietly with what he was doing. But his hands shook as he filled the radiator.

When Wilson’s car had gone on, he went automatically about his preparations for the return trip—lifted a seat cushion to investigate his own store of gasolene, replacing carefully the revolver he always carried under the seat and packed in waste to prevent its accidental discharge, lighted his lamps, examined a loose brake-band.

His coolness gratified him. He had been an ass: Le Moyne was right. He’d get away—to Cuba if he could—and start over again. He would forget the Street and let it forget him.

The men in the garage were talking.

“To Schwitter’s, of course,” one of them grumbled. “We might as well go out of business.”

“There’s no money in running a straight place. Schwitter and half a dozen others are getting rich.”

“That was Wilson, the surgeon in town. He cut off my brother-in-law’s leg—charged him as much as if he had grown a new one for him. He used to come here. Now he goes to Schwitter’s, like the rest. Pretty girl he had with him. You can bet on Wilson.”

So Max Wilson was taking Sidney to Schwitter’s, making her the butt of garage talk! The smiles of the men were evil. Joe’s hands grew cold, his head hot. A red mist spread between him and the line of electric lights. He knew Schwitter’s, and he knew Wilson.

He flung himself into his car and threw the throttle open. The car jerked, stalled.

“You can’t start like that, son,” one of the men remonstrated. “You let ‘er in too fast.”

“You go to hell!” Joe snarled, and made a second ineffectual effort.

Thus adjured, the men offered neither further advice nor assistance. The minutes went by in useless cranking—fifteen. The red mist grew heavier. Every lamp was a danger signal. But when K., growing uneasy, came out into the yard, the engine had started at last. He was in time to see Joe run his car into the road and turn it viciously toward Schwitter’s.

Carlotta’s nearness was having its calculated effect on Max Wilson. His spirits rose as the engine, marking perfect time, carried them along the quiet roads.

Partly it was reaction—relief that she should be so reasonable, so complaisant—and a sort of holiday spirit after the day’s hard work. Oddly enough, and not so irrational as may appear, Sidney formed a part of the evening’s happiness—that she loved him; that, back in the lecture-room, eyes and even mind on the lecturer, her heart was with him.

So, with Sidney the basis of his happiness, he made the most of his evening’s freedom. He sang a little in his clear tenor—even, once when they had slowed down at a crossing, bent over audaciously and kissed Carlotta’s hand in the full glare of a passing train.

“How reckless of you!”

“I like to be reckless,” he replied.

His boyishness annoyed Carlotta. She did not want the situation to get out of hand. Moreover, what was so real for her was only too plainly a lark for him. She began to doubt her power.

The hopelessness of her situation was dawning on her. Even when the touch of her beside him and the solitude of the country roads got in his blood, and he bent toward her, she found no encouragement in his words:—“I am mad about you tonight.”

She took her courage in her hands:—“Then why give me up for some one else?”

“That’s—different.”

“Why is it different? I am a woman. I—I love you, Max. No one else will ever care as I do.”

“You are in love with the Lamb!”

“That was a trick. I’m sorry, Max. I don’t care for anyone else in the world. If you let me go I’ll want to die.”

Then, as he was silent:—

“If you’ll marry me, I’ll be true to you all my life. I swear it. There will be nobody else, ever.”

The sense, if not the words, of what he had sworn to Sidney that Sunday afternoon under the trees, on this very road! Swift shame overtook him, that he should be here, that he had allowed Carlotta to remain in ignorance of how things really stood between them.

“I’m sorry, Carlotta. It’s impossible. I’m engaged to marry some one else.”

“Sidney Page?”—almost a whisper.

“Yes.”

He was ashamed at the way she took the news. If she had stormed or wept, he would have known what to do. But she sat still, not speaking.

“You must have expected it, sooner or later.”

Still she made no reply. He thought she might faint, and looked at her anxiously. Her profile, indistinct beside him, looked white and drawn. But Carlotta was not fainting. She was making a desperate plan. If their escapade became known, it would end things between Sidney and him. She was sure of that. She needed time to think it out. It must become known without any apparent move on her part. If, for instance, she became ill, and was away from the hospital all night, that might answer. The thing would be investigated, and who knew—

The car turned in at Schwitter’s road and drew up before the house. The narrow porch was filled with small tables, above which hung rows of electric lights enclosed in Japanese paper lanterns. Midweek, which had found the White Springs Hotel almost deserted, saw Schwitter’s crowded tables set out under the trees. Seeing the crowd, Wilson drove directly to the yard and parked his machine.

“No need of running any risk,” he explained to the still figure beside him. “We can walk back and take a table under the trees, away from those infernal lanterns.”

She reeled a little as he helped her out.

“Not sick, are you?”

“I’m dizzy. I’m all right.”

She looked white. He felt a stab of pity for her. She leaned rather heavily on him as they walked toward the house. The faint perfume that had almost intoxicated him, earlier, vaguely irritated him now.

At the rear of the house she shook off his arm and preceded him around the building. She chose the end of the porch as the place in which to drop, and went down like a stone, falling back.

There was a moderate excitement. The visitors at Schwitter’s were too much engrossed with themselves to be much interested. She opened her eyes almost as soon as she fell—to forestall any tests; she was shrewd enough to know that Wilson would detect her malingering very quickly—and begged to be taken into the house. “I feel very ill,” she said, and her white face bore her out.

Schwitter and Bill carried her in and up the stairs to one of the newly furnished rooms. The little man was twittering with anxiety. He had a horror of knockout drops and the police. They laid her on the bed, her hat beside her; and Wilson, stripping down the long sleeve of her glove, felt her pulse.

“There’s a doctor in the next town,” said Schwitter. “I was going to send for him, anyhow—my wife’s not very well.”

“I’m a doctor.”

“Is it anything serious?”

“Nothing serious.”

He closed the door behind the relieved figure of the landlord, and, going back to Carlotta, stood looking down at her.

“What did you mean by doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“You were no more faint than I am.”

She closed her eyes.

“I don’t remember. Everything went black. The lanterns—”

He crossed the room deliberately and went out, closing the door behind him. He saw at once where he stood—in what danger. If she insisted that she was ill and unable to go back, there would be a fuss. The story would come out. Everything would be gone. Schwitter’s, of all places!

At the foot of the stairs, Schwitter pulled himself together. After all, the girl was only ill. There was nothing for the police. He looked at his watch. The doctor ought to be here by this time. It was sooner than they had expected. Even the nurse had not come. Tillie was alone, out in the harness-room. He looked through the crowded rooms, at the overflowing porch with its travesty of pleasure, and he hated the whole thing with a desperate hatred.

Another car. Would they never stop coming! But perhaps it was the doctor. A young man edged his way into the hall and confronted him.

“Two people just arrived here. A man and a woman—in white. Where are they?”

It was trouble then, after all!

“Upstairs—first bedroom to the right.” His teeth chattered. Surely, as a man sowed he reaped.

Joe went up the staircase. At the top, on the landing, he confronted Wilson. He fired at him without a word—saw him fling up his arms and fall back, striking first the wall, then the floor.

The buzz of conversation on the porch suddenly ceased. Joe put his revolver in his pocket and went quietly down the stairs. The crowd parted to let him through.

Carlotta, crouched in her room, listening, not daring to open the door, heard the sound of a car as it swung out into the road.

CHAPTER XXV

On the evening of the shooting at Schwitter’s, there had been a late operation at the hospital. Sidney, having duly transcribed her lecture notes and said her prayers, was already asleep when she received the insistent summons to the operating-room. She dressed again with flying fingers. These night battles with death roused all her fighting blood. There were times when she felt as if, by sheer will, she could force strength, life itself, into failing bodies. Her sensitive nostrils dilated, her brain worked like a machine.

That night she received well-deserved praise. When the Lamb, telephoning hysterically, had failed to locate the younger Wilson, another staff surgeon was called. His keen eyes watched Sidney—felt her capacity, her fiber, so to speak; and, when everything was over, he told her what was in his mind.

“Don’t wear yourself out, girl,” he said gravely. “We need people like you. It was good work tonight—fine work. I wish we had more like you.”

By midnight the work was done, and the nurse in charge sent Sidney to bed.

It was the Lamb who received the message about Wilson; and because he was not very keen at the best, and because the news was so startling, he refused to credit his ears.

“Who is this at the ‘phone?”

“That doesn’t matter. Le Moyne’s my name. Get the message to Dr. Ed Wilson at once. We are starting to the city.”

“Tell me again. I mustn’t make a mess of this.”

“Dr. Wilson, the surgeon, has been shot,” came slowly and distinctly. “Get the staff there and have a room ready. Get the operating-room ready, too.”

The Lamb wakened then, and roused the house. He was incoherent, rather, so that Dr. Ed got the impression that it was Le Moyne who had been shot, and only learned the truth when he got to the hospital.

“Where is he?” he demanded. He liked K., and his heart was sore within him.

“Not in yet, sir. A Mr. Le Moyne is bringing him. Staff’s in the executive committee room, sir.”

“But—who has been shot? I thought you said—”

The Lamb turned pale at that, and braced himself.

“I’m sorry—I thought you understood. I believe it’s not—not serious. It’s Dr. Max, sir.”

Dr. Ed, who was heavy and not very young, sat down on an office chair. Out of sheer habit he had brought the bag. He put it down on the floor beside him, and moistened his lips.

“Is he living?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I gathered that Mr. Le Moyne did not think it serious.”

He lied, and Dr. Ed knew he lied.

The Lamb stood by the door, and Dr. Ed sat and waited. The office clock said half after three. Outside the windows, the night world went by—taxicabs full of roisterers, women who walked stealthily close to the buildings, a truck carrying steel, so heavy that it shook the hospital as it rumbled by.

Dr. Ed sat and waited. The bag with the dog-collar in it was on the floor. He thought of many things, but mostly of the promise he had made his mother. And, having forgotten the injured man’s shortcomings, he was remembering his good qualities—his cheerfulness, his courage, his achievements. He remembered the day Max had done the Edwardes operation, and how proud he had been of him. He figured out how old he was—not thirty-one yet, and already, perhaps—There he stopped thinking. Cold beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“I think I hear them now, sir,” said the Lamb, and stood back respectfully to let him pass out of the door.

Carlotta stayed in the room during the consultation. No one seemed to wonder why she was there, or to pay any attention to her. The staff was stricken. They moved back to make room for Dr. Ed beside the bed, and then closed in again.

Carlotta waited, her hand over her mouth to keep herself from screaming. Surely they would operate; they wouldn’t let him die like that!

When she saw the phalanx break up, and realized that they would not operate, she went mad. She stood against the door, and accused them of cowardice—taunted them.

“Do you think he would let any of you die like that?” she cried. “Die like a hurt dog, and none of you to lift a hand?”

It was Pfeiffer who drew her out of the room and tried to talk reason and sanity to her.

“It’s hopeless,” he said. “If there was a chance, we’d operate, and you know it.”

The staff went hopelessly down the stairs to the smoking-room, and smoked. It was all they could do. The night assistant sent coffee down to them, and they drank it. Dr. Ed stayed in his brother’s room, and said to his mother, under his breath, that he’d tried to do his best by Max, and that from now on it would be up to her.

K. had brought the injured man in. The country doctor had come, too, finding Tillie’s trial not imminent. On the way in he had taken it for granted that K. was a medical man like himself, and had placed his hypodermic case at his disposal.

When he missed him,—in the smoking-room, that was,—he asked for him.

“I don’t see the chap who came in with us,” he said. “Clever fellow. Like to know his name.”

The staff did not know.

K. sat alone on a bench in the hall. He wondered who would tell Sidney; he hoped they would be very gentle with her. He sat in the shadow, waiting. He did not want to go home and leave her to what she might have to face. There was a chance she would ask for him. He wanted to be near, in that case.

He sat in the shadow, on the bench. The night watchman went by twice and stared at him. At last he asked K. to mind the door until he got some coffee.

“One of the staff’s been hurt,” he explained. “If I don’t get some coffee now, I won’t get any.”

K. promised to watch the door.

A desperate thing had occurred to Carlotta. Somehow, she had not thought of it before. Now she wondered how she could have failed to think of it. If only she could find him and he would do it! She would go down on her knees—would tell him everything, if only he would consent.

When she found him on his bench, however, she passed him by. She had a terrible fear that he might go away if she put the thing to him first. He clung hard to his new identity.

So first she went to the staff and confronted them. They were men of courage, only declining to undertake what they considered hopeless work. The one man among them who might have done the thing with any chance of success lay stricken. Not one among them but would have given of his best—only his best was not good enough.

“It would be the Edwardes operation, wouldn’t it?” demanded Carlotta.

The staff was bewildered. There were no rules to cover such conduct on the part of a nurse. One of them—Pfeiffer again, by chance—replied rather heavily:—

“If any, it would be the Edwardes operation.”

“Would Dr. Edwardes himself be able to do anything?”

This was going a little far.

“Possibly. One chance in a thousand, perhaps. But Edwardes is dead. How did this thing happen, Miss Harrison?”

She ignored his question. Her face was ghastly, save for the trace of rouge; her eyes were red-rimmed.

“Dr. Edwardes is sitting on a bench in the hall outside!” she announced.

Her voice rang out. K. heard her and raised his head. His attitude was weary, resigned. The thing had come, then! He was to take up the old burden. The girl had told.

Dr. Ed had sent for Sidney. Max was still unconscious. Ed remembered about her when, tracing his brother’s career from his babyhood to man’s estate and to what seemed now to be its ending, he had remembered that Max was very fond of Sidney. He had hoped that Sidney would take him and do for him what he, Ed, had failed to do.

So Sidney was summoned.

She thought it was another operation, and her spirit was just a little weary. But her courage was indomitable. She forced her shoes on her tired feet, and bathed her face in cold water to rouse herself.

The night watchman was in the hall. He was fond of Sidney; she always smiled at him; and, on his morning rounds at six o’clock to waken the nurses, her voice was always amiable. So she found him in the hall, holding a cup of tepid coffee. He was old and bleary, unmistakably dirty too—but he had divined Sidney’s romance.

“Coffee! For me?” She was astonished.

“Drink it. You haven’t had much sleep.”

She took it obediently, but over the cup her eyes searched his.

“There is something wrong, daddy.”

That was his name, among the nurses. He had had another name, but it was lost in the mists of years.

“Get it down.”

So she finished it, not without anxiety that she might be needed. But daddy’s attentions were for few, and not to be lightly received.

“Can you stand a piece of bad news?”

Strangely, her first thought was of K.

“There has been an accident. Dr. Wilson—”

“Which one?”

“Dr. Max—has been hurt. It ain’t much, but I guess you’d like to know it.”

“Where is he?”

“Downstairs, in Seventeen.”

So she went down alone to the room where Dr. Ed sat in a chair, with his untidy bag beside him on the floor, and his eyes fixed on a straight figure on the bed. When he saw Sidney, he got up and put his arms around her. His eyes told her the truth before he told her anything. She hardly listened to what he said. The fact was all that concerned her—that her lover was dying there, so near that she could touch him with her hand, so far away that no voice, no caress of hers, could reach him.

The why would come later. Now she could only stand, with Dr. Ed’s arms about her, and wait.

“If they would only do something!” Sidney’s voice sounded strange to her ears.

“There is nothing to do.”

But that, it seemed, was wrong. For suddenly Sidney’s small world, which had always sedately revolved in one direction, began to move the other way.

The door opened, and the staff came in. But where before they had moved heavily, with drooped heads, now they came quickly, as men with a purpose. There was a tall man in a white coat with them. He ordered them about like children, and they hastened to do his will. At first Sidney only knew that now, at last, they were going to do something—the tall man was going to do something. He stood with his back to Sidney, and gave orders.

The heaviness of inactivity lifted. The room buzzed. The nurses stood by, while the staff did nurses’ work. The senior surgical interne, essaying assistance, was shoved aside by the senior surgical consultant, and stood by, aggrieved.

It was the Lamb, after all, who brought the news to Sidney. The new activity had caught Dr. Ed, and she was alone now, her face buried against the back of a chair.

“There’ll be something doing now, Miss Page,” he offered.

“What are they going to do?”

“Going after the bullet. Do you know who’s going to do it?”

His voice echoed the subdued excitement of the room—excitement and new hope.

“Did you ever hear of Edwardes, the surgeon?—the Edwardes operation, you know. Well, he’s here. It sounds like a miracle. They found him sitting on a bench in the hall downstairs.”

Sidney raised her head, but she could not see the miraculously found Edwardes. She could see the familiar faces of the staff, and that other face on the pillow, and—she gave a little cry. There was K.! How like him to be there, to be wherever anyone was in trouble! Tears came to her eyes—the first tears she had shed.

As if her eyes had called him, he looked up and saw her. He came toward her at once. The staff stood back to let him pass, and gazed after him. The wonder of what had happened was growing on them.

K. stood beside Sidney, and looked down at her. Just at first it seemed as if he found nothing to say. Then:

“There’s just a chance, Sidney dear. Don’t count too much on it.”

“I have got to count on it. If I don’t, I shall die.”

If a shadow passed over his face, no one saw it.

“I’ll not ask you to go back to your room. If you will wait somewhere near, I’ll see that you have immediate word.”

“I am going to the operating-room.”

“Not to the operating-room. Somewhere near.”

His steady voice controlled her hysteria. But she resented it. She was not herself, of course, what with strain and weariness.

“I shall ask Dr. Edwardes.”

He was puzzled for a moment. Then he understood. After all, it was as well. Whether she knew him as Le Moyne or as Edwardes mattered very little, after all. The thing that really mattered was that he must try to save Wilson for her. If he failed—It ran through his mind that if he failed she might hate him the rest of her life—not for himself, but for his failure; that, whichever way things went, he must lose.

“Dr. Edwardes says you are to stay away from the operation, but to remain near. He—he promises to call you if—things go wrong.”

She had to be content with that.

Nothing about that night was real to Sidney. She sat in the anaesthetizing-room, and after a time she knew that she was not alone. There was somebody else. She realized dully that Carlotta was there, too, pacing up and down the little room. She was never sure, for instance, whether she imagined it, or whether Carlotta really stopped before her and surveyed her with burning eyes.

“So you thought he was going to marry you!” said Carlotta—or the dream. “Well, you see he isn’t.”

Sidney tried to answer, and failed—or that was the way the dream went.

“If you had enough character, I’d think you did it. How do I know you didn’t follow us, and shoot him as he left the room?”

It must have been reality, after all; for Sidney’s numbed mind grasped the essential fact here, and held on to it. He had been out with Carlotta. He had promised—sworn that this should not happen. It had happened. It surprised her. It seemed as if nothing more could hurt her.

In the movement to and from the operating room, the door stood open for a moment. A tall figure—how much it looked like K.!—straightened and held out something in its hand.

“The bullet!” said Carlotta in a whisper.

Then more waiting, a stir of movement in the room beyond the closed door. Carlotta was standing, her face buried in her hands, against the door. Sidney suddenly felt sorry for her. She cared a great deal. It must be tragic to care like that! She herself was not caring much; she was too numb.

Beyond, across the courtyard, was the stable. Before the day of the motor ambulances, horses had waited there for their summons, eager as fire horses, heads lifted to the gong. When Sidney saw the outline of the stable roof, she knew that it was dawn. The city still slept, but the torturing night was over. And in the gray dawn the staff, looking gray too, and elderly and weary, came out through the closed door and took their hushed way toward the elevator. They were talking among themselves. Sidney, straining her ears, gathered that they had seen a miracle, and that the wonder was still on them.

Carlotta followed them out.

Almost on their heels came K. He was in the white coat, and more and more he looked like the man who had raised up from his work and held out something in his hand. Sidney’s head was aching and confused.

She sat there in her chair, looking small and childish. The dawn was morning now—horizontal rays of sunlight on the stable roof and across the windowsill of the anaesthetizing-room, where a row of bottles sat on a clean towel.

The tall man—or was it K.?—looked at her, and then reached up and turned off the electric light. Why, it was K., of course; and he was putting out the hall light before he went upstairs. When the light was out everything was gray. She could not see. She slid very quietly out of her chair, and lay at his feet in a dead faint.

K. carried her to the elevator. He held her as he had held her that day at the park when she fell in the river, very carefully, tenderly, as one holds something infinitely precious. Not until he had placed her on her bed did she open her eyes. But she was conscious before that. She was so tired, and to be carried like that, in strong arms, not knowing where one was going, or caring—

The nurse he had summoned hustled out for aromatic ammonia. Sidney, lying among her pillows, looked up at K.

“How is he?”

“A little better. There’s a chance, dear.”

“I have been so mixed up. All the time I was sitting waiting, I kept thinking that it was you who were operating! Will he really get well?”

“It looks promising.”

“I should like to thank Dr. Edwardes.”

The nurse was a long time getting the ammonia. There was so much to talk about: that Dr. Max had been out with Carlotta Harrison, and had been shot by a jealous woman; the inexplicable return to life of the great Edwardes; and—a fact the nurse herself was willing to vouch for, and that thrilled the training-school to the core—that this very Edwardes, newly risen, as it were, and being a miracle himself as well as performing one, this very Edwardes, carrying Sidney to her bed and putting her down, had kissed her on her white forehead.

The training-school doubted this. How could he know Sidney Page? And, after all, the nurse had only seen it in the mirror, being occupied at the time in seeing if her cap was straight. The school, therefore, accepted the miracle, but refused the kiss.

The miracle was no miracle, of course. But something had happened to K. that savored of the marvelous. His faith in himself was coming back—not strongly, with a rush, but with all humility. He had been loath to take up the burden; but, now that he had it, he breathed a sort of inarticulate prayer to be able to carry it.

And, since men have looked for signs since the beginning of time, he too asked for a sign. Not, of course, that he put it that way, or that he was making terms with Providence. It was like this: if Wilson got well, he’d keep on working. He’d feel that, perhaps, after all, this was meant. If Wilson died—Sidney held out her hand to him.

“What should I do without you, K.?” she asked wistfully.

“All you have to do is to want me.”

His voice was not too steady, and he took her pulse in a most businesslike way to distract her attention from it.

“How very many things you know! You are quite professional about pulses.”

Even then he did not tell her. He was not sure, to be frank, that she’d be interested. Now, with Wilson as he was, was no time to obtrude his own story. There was time enough for that.

“Will you drink some beef tea if I send it to you?”

“I’m not hungry. I will, of course.”

“And—will you try to sleep?”

“Sleep, while he—”

“I promise to tell you if there is any change. I shall stay with him.”

“I’ll try to sleep.”

But, as he rose from the chair beside her low bed, she put out her hand to him.

“K.”

“Yes, dear.”

“He was out with Carlotta. He promised, and he broke his promise.”

“There may have been reasons. Suppose we wait until he can explain.”

“How can he explain?” And, when he hesitated: “I bring all my troubles to you, as if you had none. Somehow, I can’t go to Aunt Harriet, and of course mother—Carlotta cares a great deal for him. She said that I shot him. Does anyone really think that?”

“Of course not. Please stop thinking.”

“But who did, K.? He had so many friends, and no enemies that I knew of.”

Her mind seemed to stagger about in a circle, making little excursions, but always coming back to the one thing.

“Some drunken visitor to the roadhouse.”

He could have killed himself for the words the moment they were spoken.

“They were at a roadhouse?”

“It is not just to judge anyone before you hear the story.”

She stirred restlessly.

“What time is it?”

“Half-past six.”

“I must get up and go on duty.”

He was glad to be stern with her. He forbade her rising. When the nurse came in with the belated ammonia, she found K. making an arbitrary ruling, and Sidney looking up at him mutinously.

“Miss Page is not to go on duty to-day. She is to stay in bed until further orders.”

“Very well, Dr. Edwardes.”

The confusion in Sidney’s mind cleared away suddenly. K. was Dr. Edwardes! It was K. who had performed the miracle operation—K. who had dared and perhaps won! Dear K., with his steady eyes and his long surgeon’s fingers! Then, because she seemed to see ahead as well as back into the past in that flash that comes to the drowning and to those recovering from shock, and because she knew that now the little house would no longer be home to K., she turned her face into her pillow and cried. Her world had fallen indeed. Her lover was not true and might be dying; her friend would go away to his own world, which was not the Street.

K. left her at last and went back to Seventeen, where Dr. Ed still sat by the bed. Inaction was telling on him. If Max would only open his eyes, so he could tell him what had been in his mind all these years—his pride in him and all that.

With a sort of belated desire to make up for where he had failed, he put the bag that had been Max’s bete noir on the bedside table, and began to clear it of rubbish—odd bits of dirty cotton, the tubing from a long defunct stethoscope, glass from a broken bottle, a scrap of paper on which was a memorandum, in his illegible writing, to send Max a check for his graduating suit. When K. came in, he had the old dog-collar in his hand.

“Belonged to an old collie of ours,” he said heavily. “Milkman ran over him and killed him. Max chased the wagon and licked the driver with his own whip.”

His face worked.

“Poor old Bobby Burns!” he said. “We’d raised him from a pup. Got him in a grape-basket.”

The sick man opened his eyes.

CHAPTER XXVI

Max had rallied well, and things looked bright for him. His patient did not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of the excursion to Schwitter’s. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that he had saved Wilson to make Sidney ultimately wretched.

For the present, at least, K.‘s revealed identity was safe. Hospitals keep their secrets well. And it is doubtful if the Street would have been greatly concerned even had it known. It had never heard of Edwardes, of the Edwardes clinic or the Edwardes operation. Its medical knowledge comprised the two Wilsons and the osteopath around the corner. When, as would happen soon, it learned of Max Wilson’s injury, it would be more concerned with his chances of recovery than with the manner of it. That was as it should be.

But Joe’s affair with Sidney had been the talk of the neighborhood. If the boy disappeared, a scandal would be inevitable. Twenty people had seen him at Schwitter’s and would know him again.

To save Joe, then, was K.‘s first care.

At first it seemed as if the boy had frustrated him. He had not been home all night. Christine, waylaying K. in the little hall, told him that. “Mrs. Drummond was here,” she said. “She is almost frantic. She says Joe has not been home all night. She says he looks up to you, and she thought if you could find him and would talk to him—”

“Joe was with me last night. We had supper at the White Springs Hotel. Tell Mrs. Drummond he was in good spirits, and that she’s not to worry. I feel sure she will hear from him to-day. Something went wrong with his car, perhaps, after he left me.”

He bathed and shaved hurriedly. Katie brought his coffee to his room, and he drank it standing. He was working out a theory about the boy. Beyond Schwitter’s the highroad stretched, broad and inviting, across the State. Either he would have gone that way, his little car eating up the miles all that night, or—K. would not formulate his fear of what might have happened, even to himself.

As he went down the Street, he saw Mrs. McKee in her doorway, with a little knot of people around her. The Street was getting the night’s news.

He rented a car at a local garage, and drove himself out into the country. He was not minded to have any eyes on him that day. He went to Schwitter’s first. Schwitter himself was not in sight. Bill was scrubbing the porch, and a farmhand was gathering bottles from the grass into a box. The dead lanterns swung in the morning air, and from back on the hill came the staccato sounds of a reaping-machine.

“Where’s Schwitter?”

“At the barn with the missus. Got a boy back there.”

Bill grinned. He recognized K., and, mopping dry a part of the porch, shoved a chair on it.

“Sit down. Well, how’s the man who got his last night? Dead?”

“No.”

“County detectives were here bright and early. After the lady’s husband. I guess we lose our license over this.”

“What does Schwitter say?”

“Oh, him!” Bill’s tone was full of disgust. “He hopes we do. He hates the place. Only man I ever knew that hated money. That’s what this house is—money.”

“Bill, did you see the man who fired that shot last night?”

A sort of haze came over Bill’s face, as if he had dropped a curtain before his eyes. But his reply came promptly:

“Surest thing in the world. Close to him as you are to me. Dark man, about thirty, small mustache—”

“Bill, you’re lying, and I know it. Where is he?”

The barkeeper kept his head, but his color changed.

“I don’t know anything about him.” He thrust his mop into the pail. K. rose.

“Does Schwitter know?”

“He doesn’t know nothing. He’s been out at the barn all night.”

The farmhand had filled his box and disappeared around the corner of the house. K. put his hand on Bill’s shirt-sleeved arm.

“We’ve got to get him away from here, Bill.”

“Get who away?”

“You know. The county men may come back to search the premises.”

“How do I know you aren’t one of them?”

“I guess you know I’m not. He’s a friend of mine. As a matter of fact, I followed him here; but I was too late. Did he take the revolver away with him?”

“I took it from him. It’s under the bar.”

“Get it for me.”

In sheer relief, K.‘s spirits rose. After all, it was a good world: Tillie with her baby in her arms; Wilson conscious and rallying; Joe safe, and, without the revolver, secure from his own remorse. Other things there were, too—the feel of Sidney’s inert body in his arms, the way she had turned to him in trouble. It was not what he wanted, this last, but it was worth while. The reaping-machine was in sight now; it had stopped on the hillside. The men were drinking out of a bucket that flashed in the sun.

There was one thing wrong. What had come over Wilson, to do so reckless a thing? K., who was a one-woman man, could not explain it.

From inside the bar Bill took a careful survey of Le Moyne. He noted his tall figure and shabby suit, the slight stoop, the hair graying over his ears. Barkeepers know men: that’s a part of the job. After his survey he went behind the bar and got the revolver from under an overturned pail.

K. thrust it into his pocket.

“Now,” he said quietly, “where is he?”

“In my room—top of the house.”

K. followed Bill up the stairs. He remembered the day when he had sat waiting in the parlor, and had heard Tillie’s slow step coming down. And last night he himself had carried down Wilson’s unconscious figure. Surely the wages of sin were wretchedness and misery. None of it paid. No one got away with it.

The room under the eaves was stifling. An unmade bed stood in a corner. From nails in the rafters hung Bill’s holiday wardrobe. A tin cup and a cracked pitcher of spring water stood on the windowsill.

Joe was sitting in the corner farthest from the window. When the door swung open, he looked up. He showed no interest on seeing K., who had to stoop to enter the low room.

“Hello, Joe.”

“I thought you were the police.”

“Not much. Open that window, Bill. This place is stifling.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, indeed.”

“I wish I’d killed him!”

“Oh, no, you don’t. You’re damned glad you didn’t, and so am I.”

“What will they do with me?”

“Nothing until they find you. I came to talk about that. They’d better not find you.”

“Huh!”

“It’s easier than it sounds.”

K. sat down on the bed.

“If I only had some money!” he said. “But never mind about that, Joe; I’ll get some.”

Loud calls from below took Bill out of the room. As he closed the door behind him, K.‘s voice took on a new tone: “Joe, why did you do it?”

“You know.”

“You saw him with somebody at the White Springs, and followed them?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who was with him?”

“Yes, and so do you. Don’t go into that. I did it, and I’ll stand by it.”

“Has it occurred to you that you made a mistake?”

“Go and tell that to somebody who’ll believe you!” he sneered. “They came here and took a room. I met him coming out of it. I’d do it again if I had a chance, and do it better.”

“It was not Sidney.”

“Aw, chuck it!”

“It’s a fact. I got here not two minutes after you left. The girl was still there. It was some one else. Sidney was not out of the hospital last night. She attended a lecture, and then an operation.”

Joe listened. It was undoubtedly a relief to him to know that it had not been Sidney; but if K. expected any remorse, he did not get it.

“If he is that sort, he deserves what he got,” said the boy grimly.

And K. had no reply. But Joe was glad to talk. The hours he had spent alone in the little room had been very bitter, and preceded by a time that he shuddered to remember. K. got it by degrees—his descent of the staircase, leaving Wilson lying on the landing above; his resolve to walk back and surrender himself at Schwitter’s, so that there could be no mistake as to who had committed the crime.

“I intended to write a confession and then shoot myself,” he told K. “But the barkeeper got my gun out of my pocket. And—”

After a pause: “Does she know who did it?”

“Sidney? No.”

“Then, if he gets better, she’ll marry him anyhow.”

“Possibly. That’s not up to us, Joe. The thing we’ve got to do is to hush the thing up, and get you away.”

“I’d go to Cuba, but I haven’t the money.”

K. rose. “I think I can get it.”

He turned in the doorway.

“Sidney need never know who did it.”

“I’m not ashamed of it.” But his face showed relief.

There are times when some cataclysm tears down the walls of reserve between men. That time had come for Joe, and to a lesser extent for K. The boy rose and followed him to the door.

“Why don’t you tell her the whole thing?—the whole filthy story?” he asked. “She’d never look at him again. You’re crazy about her. I haven’t got a chance. It would give you one.”

“I want her, God knows!” said K. “But not that way, boy.”

Schwitter had taken in five hundred dollars the previous day.

“Five hundred gross,” the little man hastened to explain. “But you’re right, Mr. Le Moyne. And I guess it would please HER. It’s going hard with her, just now, that she hasn’t any women friends about. It’s in the safe, in cash; I haven’t had time to take it to the bank.” He seemed to apologize to himself for the unbusinesslike proceeding of lending an entire day’s gross receipts on no security. “It’s better to get him away, of course. It’s good business. I have tried to have an orderly place. If they arrest him here—”

His voice trailed off. He had come a far way from the day he had walked down the Street, and eyed Its poplars with appraising eyes—a far way. Now he had a son, and the child’s mother looked at him with tragic eyes. It was arranged that K. should go back to town, returning late that night to pick up Joe at a lonely point on the road, and to drive him to a railroad station. But, as it happened, he went back that afternoon.

He had told Schwitter he would be at the hospital, and the message found him there. Wilson was holding his own, conscious now and making a hard fight. The message from Schwitter was very brief:—

“Something has happened, and Tillie wants you. I don’t like to trouble you again, but she—wants you.”

K. was rather gray of face by that time, having had no sleep and little food since the day before. But he got into the rented machine again—its rental was running up; he tried to forget it—and turned it toward Hillfoot. But first of all he drove back to the Street, and walked without ringing into Mrs. McKee’s.

Neither a year’s time nor Mrs. McKee’s approaching change of state had altered the “mealing” house. The ticket-punch still lay on the hat-rack in the hall. Through the rusty screen of the back parlor window one viewed the spiraea, still in need of spraying. Mrs. McKee herself was in the pantry, placing one slice of tomato and three small lettuce leaves on each of an interminable succession of plates.

K., who was privileged, walked back.

“I’ve got a car at the door,” he announced, “and there’s nothing so extravagant as an empty seat in an automobile. Will you take a ride?”

Mrs. McKee agreed. Being of the class who believe a boudoir cap the ideal headdress for a motor-car, she apologized for having none.

“If I’d known you were coming I would have borrowed a cap,” she said. “Miss Tripp, third floor front, has a nice one. If you’ll take me in my toque—”

K. said he’d take her in her toque, and waited with some anxiety, having not the faintest idea what a toque was. He was not without other anxieties. What if the sight of Tillie’s baby did not do all that he expected? Good women could be most cruel. And Schwitter had been very vague. But here K. was more sure of himself: the little man’s voice had expressed as exactly as words the sense of a bereavement that was not a grief.

He was counting on Mrs. McKee’s old fondness for the girl to bring them together. But, as they neared the house with its lanterns and tables, its whitewashed stones outlining the drive, its small upper window behind which Joe was waiting for night, his heart failed him, rather. He had a masculine dislike for meddling, and yet—Mrs. McKee had suddenly seen the name in the wooden arch over the gate: “Schwitter’s.”

“I’m not going in there, Mr. Le Moyne.”

“Tillie’s not in the house. She’s back in the barn.”

“In the barn!”

“She didn’t approve of all that went on there, so she moved out. It’s very comfortable and clean; it smells of hay. You’d be surprised how nice it is.”

“The like of her!” snorted Mrs. McKee. “She’s late with her conscience, I’m thinking.”

“Last night,” K. remarked, hands on the wheel, but car stopped, “she had a child there. It—it’s rather like very old times, isn’t it? A man-child, Mrs. McKee, not in a manger, of course.”

“What do you want me to do?” Mrs. McKee’s tone, which had been fierce at the beginning, ended feebly.

“I want you to go in and visit her, as you would any woman who’d had a new baby and needed a friend. Lie a little—” Mrs. McKee gasped. “Tell her the baby’s pretty. Tell her you’ve been wanting to see her.” His tone was suddenly stern. “Lie a little, for your soul’s sake.”

She wavered, and while she wavered he drove her in under the arch with the shameful name, and back to the barn. But there he had the tact to remain in the car, and Mrs. McKee’s peace with Tillie was made alone. When, five minutes later, she beckoned him from the door of the barn, her eyes were red.

“Come in, Mr. K.,” she said. “The wife’s dead, poor thing. They’re going to be married right away.”

The clergyman was coming along the path with Schwitter at his heels. K. entered the barn. At the door to Tillie’s room he uncovered his head. The child was asleep at her breast.

The five thousand dollar check from Mr. Lorenz had saved Palmer Howe’s credit. On the strength of the deposit, he borrowed a thousand at the bank with which he meant to pay his bills, arrears at the University and Country Clubs, a hundred dollars lost throwing aces with poker dice, and various small obligations of Christine’s.

The immediate result of the money was good. He drank nothing for a week, went into the details of the new venture with Christine’s father, sat at home with Christine on her balcony in the evenings. With the knowledge that he could pay his debts, he postponed the day. He liked the feeling of a bank account in four figures.

The first evening or two Christine’s pleasure in having him there gratified him. He felt kind, magnanimous, almost virtuous. On the third evening he was restless. It occurred to him that his wife was beginning to take his presence as a matter of course. He wanted cold bottled beer. When he found that the ice was out and the beer warm and flat, he was furious.

Christine had been making a fight, although her heart was only half in it. She was resolutely good-humored, ignored the past, dressed for Palmer in the things he liked. They still took their dinners at the Lorenz house up the street. When she saw that the haphazard table service there irritated him, she coaxed her mother into getting a butler.

The Street sniffed at the butler behind his stately back. Secretly and in its heart, it was proud of him. With a half-dozen automobiles, and Christine Howe putting on low neck in the evenings, and now a butler, not to mention Harriet Kennedy’s Mimi, it ceased to pride itself on its commonplaceness, ignorant of the fact that in its very lack of affectation had lain its charm.

On the night that Joe shot Max Wilson, Palmer was noticeably restless. He had seen Grace Irving that day for the first time but once since the motor accident. To do him justice, his dissipation of the past few months had not included women.

The girl had a strange fascination for him. Perhaps she typified the care-free days before his marriage; perhaps the attraction was deeper, fundamental. He met her in the street the day before Max Wilson was shot. The sight of her walking sedately along in her shop-girl’s black dress had been enough to set his pulses racing. When he saw that she meant to pass him, he fell into step beside her.

“I believe you were going to cut me!”

“I was in a hurry.”

“Still in the store?”

“Yes.” And, after a second’s hesitation: “I’m keeping straight, too.”

“How are you getting along?”

“Pretty well. I’ve had my salary raised.”

“Do you have to walk as fast as this?”

“I said I was in a hurry. Once a week I get off a little early. I—”

He eyed her suspiciously.

“Early! What for?”

“I go to the hospital. The Rosenfeld boy is still there, you know.”

“Oh!”

But a moment later he burst out irritably:—

“That was an accident, Grace. The boy took the chance when he engaged to drive the car. I’m sorry, of course. I dream of the little devil sometimes, lying there. I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he added magnanimously. “I’ll stop in and talk to Wilson. He ought to have done something before this.”

“The boy’s not strong enough yet. I don’t think you can do anything for him, unless—”

The monstrous injustice of the thing overcame her. Palmer and she walking about, and the boy lying on his hot bed! She choked.

“Well?”

“He worries about his mother. If you could give her some money, it would help.”

“Money! Good Heavens—I owe everybody.”

“You owe him too, don’t you? He’ll never walk again.”

“I can’t give them ten dollars. I don’t see that I’m under any obligation, anyhow. I paid his board for two months in the hospital.”

When she did not acknowledge this generosity,—amounting to forty-eight dollars,—his irritation grew. Her silence was an accusation. Her manner galled him, into the bargain. She was too calm in his presence, too cold. Where she had once palpitated visibly under his warm gaze, she was now self-possessed and quiet. Where it had pleased his pride to think that he had given her up, he found that the shoe was on the other foot.

At the entrance to a side street she stopped.

“I turn off here.”

“May I come and see you sometime?”

“No, please.”

“That’s flat, is it?”

“It is, Palmer.”

He swung around savagely and left her.

The next day he drew the thousand dollars from the bank. A good many of his debts he wanted to pay in cash; there was no use putting checks through, with incriminating indorsements. Also, he liked the idea of carrying a roll of money around. The big fellows at the clubs always had a wad and peeled off bills like skin off an onion. He took a couple of drinks to celebrate his approaching immunity from debt.

He played auction bridge that afternoon in a private room at one of the hotels with the three men he had lunched with. Luck seemed to be with him. He won eighty dollars, and thrust it loose in his trousers pocket. Money seemed to bring money! If he could carry the thousand around for a day or so, something pretty good might come of it.

He had been drinking a little all afternoon. When the game was over, he bought drinks to celebrate his victory. The losers treated, too, to show they were no pikers. Palmer was in high spirits. He offered to put up the eighty and throw for it. The losers mentioned dinner and various engagements.

Palmer did not want to go home. Christine would greet him with raised eyebrows. They would eat a stuffy Lorenz dinner, and in the evening Christine would sit in the lamplight and drive him mad with soft music. He wanted lights, noise, the smiles of women. Luck was with him, and he wanted to be happy.

At nine o’clock that night he found Grace. She had moved to a cheap apartment which she shared with two other girls from the store. The others were out. It was his lucky day, surely.

His drunkenness was of the mind, mostly. His muscles were well controlled. The lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth were slightly accentuated, his eyes open a trifle wider than usual. That and a slight paleness of the nostrils were the only evidences of his condition. But Grace knew the signs.

“You can’t come in.”

“Of course I’m coming in.”

She retreated before him, her eyes watchful. Men in his condition were apt to be as quick with a blow as with a caress. But, having gained his point, he was amiable.

“Get your things on and come out. We can take in a roof-garden.”

“I’ve told you I’m not doing that sort of thing.”

He was ugly in a flash.

“You’ve got somebody else on the string.”

“Honestly, no. There—there has never been anybody else, Palmer.”

He caught her suddenly and jerked her toward him.

“You let me hear of anybody else, and I’ll cut the guts out of him!”

He held her for a second, his face black and fierce. Then, slowly and inevitably, he drew her into his arms. He was drunk, and she knew it. But, in the queer loyalty of her class, he was the only man she had cared for. She cared now. She took him for that moment, felt his hot kisses on her mouth, her throat, submitted while his rather brutal hands bruised her arms in fierce caresses. Then she put him from her resolutely.

“Now you’re going.”

“The hell I’m going!”

But he was less steady than he had been. The heat of the little flat brought more blood to his head. He wavered as he stood just inside the door.

“You must go back to your wife.”

“She doesn’t want me. She’s in love with a fellow at the house.”

“Palmer, hush!”

“Lemme come in and sit down, won’t you?”

She let him pass her into the sitting-room. He dropped into a chair.

“You’ve turned me down, and now Christine—she thinks I don’t know. I’m no fool; I see a lot of things. I’m no good. I know that I’ve made her miserable. But I made a merry little hell for you too, and you don’t kick about it.”

“You know that.”

She was watching him gravely. She had never seen him just like this. Nothing else, perhaps, could have shown her so well what a broken reed he was.

“I got you in wrong. You were a good girl before I knew you. You’re a good girl now. I’m not going to do you any harm, I swear it. I only wanted to take you out for a good time. I’ve got money. Look here!” He drew out the roll of bills and showed it to her. Her eyes opened wide. She had never known him to have much money.

“Lots more where that comes from.”

A new look flashed into her eyes, not cupidity, but purpose.

She was instantly cunning.

“Aren’t you going to give me some of that?”

“What for?”

“I—I want some clothes.”

The very drunk have the intuition sometimes of savages or brute beasts.

“You lie.”

“I want it for Johnny Rosenfeld.”

He thrust it back into his pocket, but his hand retained its grasp of it.

“That’s it,” he complained. “Don’t lemme be happy for a minute! Throw it all up to me!”

“You give me that for the Rosenfeld boy, and I’ll go out with you.”

“If I give you all that, I won’t have any money to go out with!”

But his eyes were wavering. She could see victory.

“Take off enough for the evening.”

But he drew himself up.

“I’m no piker,” he said largely. “Whole hog or nothing. Take it.”

He held it out to her, and from another pocket produced the eighty dollars, in crushed and wrinkled notes.

“It’s my lucky day,” he said thickly. “Plenty more where this came from. Do anything for you. Give it to the little devil. I—” He yawned. “God, this place is hot!”

His head dropped back on his chair; he propped his sagging legs on a stool. She knew him—knew that he would sleep almost all night. She would have to make up something to tell the other girls; but no matter—she could attend to that later.

She had never had a thousand dollars in her hands before. It seemed smaller than that amount. Perhaps he had lied to her. She paused, in pinning on her hat, to count the bills. It was all there.

CHAPTER XXVII

K. spent all of the evening of that day with Wilson. He was not to go for Joe until eleven o’clock. The injured man’s vitality was standing him in good stead. He had asked for Sidney and she was at his bedside. Dr. Ed had gone.

“I’m going, Max. The office is full, they tell me,” he said, bending over the bed. “I’ll come in later, and if they’ll make me a shakedown, I’ll stay with you tonight.”

The answer was faint, broken but distinct. “Get some sleep…I’ve been a poor stick…try to do better—” His roving eyes fell on the dog collar on the stand. He smiled, “Good old Bob!” he said, and put his hand over Dr. Ed’s, as it lay on the bed.

K. found Sidney in the room, not sitting, but standing by the window. The sick man was dozing. One shaded light burned in a far corner. She turned slowly and met his eyes. It seemed to K. that she looked at him as if she had never really seen him before, and he was right. Readjustments are always difficult.

Sidney was trying to reconcile the K. she had known so well with this new K., no longer obscure, although still shabby, whose height had suddenly become presence, whose quiet was the quiet of infinite power.

She was suddenly shy of him, as he stood looking down at her. He saw the gleam of her engagement ring on her finger. It seemed almost defiant. As though she had meant by wearing it to emphasize her belief in her lover.

They did not speak beyond their greeting, until he had gone over the record. Then:—

“We can’t talk here. I want to talk to you, K.”

He led the way into the corridor. It was very dim. Far away was the night nurse’s desk, with its lamp, its annunciator, its pile of records. The passage floor reflected the light on glistening boards.

“I have been thinking until I am almost crazy, K. And now I know how it happened. It was Joe.”

“The principal thing is, not how it happened, but that he is going to get well, Sidney.”

She stood looking down, twisting her ring around her finger.

“Is Joe in any danger?”

“We are going to get him away tonight. He wants to go to Cuba. He’ll get off safely, I think.”

“WE are going to get him away! YOU are, you mean. You shoulder all our troubles, K., as if they were your own.”

“I?” He was genuinely surprised. “Oh, I see. You mean—but my part in getting Joe off is practically nothing. As a matter of fact, Schwitter has put up the money. My total capital in the world, after paying the taxicab to-day, is seven dollars.”

“The taxicab?”

“By Jove, I was forgetting! Best news you ever heard of! Tillie married and has a baby—all in twenty-four hours! Boy—they named it Le Moyne. Squalled like a maniac when the water went on its head. I—I took Mrs. McKee out in a hired machine. That’s what happened to my capital.” He grinned sheepishly. “She said she would have to go in her toque. I had awful qualms. I thought it was a wrapper.”

“You, of course,” she said. “You find Max and save him—don’t look like that! You did, didn’t you? And you get Joe away, borrowing money to send him. And as if that isn’t enough, when you ought to have been getting some sleep, you are out taking a friend to Tillie, and being godfather to the baby.”

He looked uncomfortable, almost guilty.

“I had a day off. I—”

“When I look back and remember how all these months I’ve been talking about service, and you said nothing at all, and all the time you were living what I preached—I’m so ashamed, K.”

He would not allow that. It distressed him. She saw that, and tried to smile.

“When does Joe go?”

“Tonight. I’m to take him across the country to the railroad. I was wondering—”

“Yes?”

“I’d better explain first what happened, and why it happened. Then if you are willing to send him a line, I think it would help. He saw a girl in white in the car and followed in his own machine. He thought it was you, of course. He didn’t like the idea of your going to Schwitter’s. Carlotta was taken ill. And Schwitter and—and Wilson took her upstairs to a room.”

“Do you believe that, K.?”

“I do. He saw Max coming out and misunderstood. He fired at him then.”

“He did it for me. I feel very guilty, K., as if it all comes back to me. I’ll write to him, of course. Poor Joe!”

He watched her go down the hall toward the night nurse’s desk. He would have given everything just then for the right to call her back, to take her in his arms and comfort her. She seemed so alone. He himself had gone through loneliness and heartache, and the shadow was still on him. He waited until he saw her sit down at the desk and take up a pen. Then he went back into the quiet room.

He stood by the bedside, looking down. Wilson was breathing quietly: his color was coming up, as he rallied from the shock. In K.‘s mind now was just one thought—to bring him through for Sidney, and then to go away. He might follow Joe to Cuba. There were chances there. He could do sanitation work, or he might try the Canal.

The Street would go on working out its own salvation. He would have to think of something for the Rosenfelds. And he was worried about Christine. But there again, perhaps it would be better if he went away. Christine’s story would have to work itself out. His hands were tied.

He was glad in a way that Sidney had asked no questions about him, had accepted his new identity so calmly. It had been overshadowed by the night tragedy. It would have pleased him if she had shown more interest, of course. But he understood. It was enough, he told himself, that he had helped her, that she counted on him. But more and more he knew in his heart that it was not enough. “I’d better get away from here,” he told himself savagely.

And having taken the first step toward flight, as happens in such cases, he was suddenly panicky with fear, fear that he would get out of hand, and take her in his arms, whether or no; a temptation to run from temptation, to cut everything and go with Joe that night. But there his sense of humor saved him. That would be a sight for the gods, two defeated lovers flying together under the soft September moon.

Some one entered the room. He thought it was Sidney and turned with the light in his eyes that was only for her. It was Carlotta.

She was not in uniform. She wore a dark skirt and white waist and her high heels tapped as she crossed the room. She came directly to him.

“He is better, isn’t he?”

“He is rallying. Of course it will be a day or two before we are quite sure.”

She stood looking down at Wilson’s quiet figure.

“I guess you know I’ve been crazy about him,” she said quietly. “Well, that’s all over. He never really cared for me. I played his game and I—lost. I’ve been expelled from the school.”

Quite suddenly she dropped on her knees beside the bed, and put her cheek close to the sleeping man’s hand. When after a moment she rose, she was controlled again, calm, very white.

“Will you tell him, Dr. Edwardes, when he is conscious, that I came in and said good-bye?”

“I will, of course. Do you want to leave any other message?”

She hesitated, as if the thought tempted her. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

“What would be the use? He doesn’t want any message from me.”

She turned toward the door. But K. could not let her go like that. Her face frightened him. It was too calm, too controlled. He followed her across the room.

“What are your plans?”

“I haven’t any. I’m about through with my training, but I’ve lost my diploma.”

“I don’t like to see you going away like this.”

She avoided his eyes, but his kindly tone did what neither the Head nor the Executive Committee had done that day. It shook her control.

“What does it matter to you? You don’t owe me anything.”

“Perhaps not. One way and another I’ve known you a long time.”

“You never knew anything very good.”

“I’ll tell you where I live, and—”

“I know where you live.”

“Will you come to see me there? We may be able to think of something.”

“What is there to think of? This story will follow me wherever I go! I’ve tried twice for a diploma and failed. What’s the use?”

But in the end he prevailed on her to promise not to leave the city until she had seen him again. It was not until she had gone, a straight figure with haunted eyes, that he reflected whimsically that once again he had defeated his own plans for flight.

In the corridor outside the door Carlotta hesitated. Why not go back? Why not tell him? He was kind; he was going to do something for her. But the old instinct of self-preservation prevailed. She went on to her room.

Sidney brought her letter to Joe back to K. She was flushed with the effort and with a new excitement.

“This is the letter, K., and—I haven’t been able to say what I wanted, exactly. You’ll let him know, won’t you, how I feel, and how I blame myself?”

K. promised gravely.

“And the most remarkable thing has happened. What a day this has been! Somebody has sent Johnny Rosenfeld a lot of money. The ward nurse wants you to come back.”

The ward had settled for the night. The well-ordered beds of the daytime were chaotic now, torn apart by tossing figures. The night was hot and an electric fan hummed in a far corner. Under its sporadic breezes, as it turned, the ward was trying to sleep.

Johnny Rosenfeld was not asleep. An incredible thing had happened to him. A fortune lay under his pillow. He was sure it was there, for ever since it came his hot hand had clutched it.

He was quite sure that somehow or other K. had had a hand in it. When he disclaimed it, the boy was bewildered.

“It’ll buy the old lady what she wants for the house, anyhow,” he said. “But I hope nobody’s took up a collection for me. I don’t want no charity.”

“Maybe Mr. Howe sent it.”

“You can bet your last match he didn’t.”

In some unknown way the news had reached the ward that Johnny’s friend, Mr. Le Moyne, was a great surgeon. Johnny had rejected it scornfully.

“He works in the gas office,” he said, “I’ve seen him there. If he’s a surgeon, what’s he doing in the gas office. If he’s a surgeon, what’s he doing teaching me raffia-work? Why isn’t he on his job?”

But the story had seized on his imagination.

“Say, Mr. Le Moyne.”

“Yes, Jack.”

He called him “Jack.” The boy liked it. It savored of man to man. After all, he was a man, or almost. Hadn’t he driven a car? Didn’t he have a state license?

“They’ve got a queer story about you here in the ward.”

“Not scandal, I trust, Jack!”

“They say that you’re a surgeon; that you operated on Dr. Wilson and saved his life. They say that you’re the king pin where you came from.” He eyed K. wistfully. “I know it’s a damn lie, but if it’s true—”

“I used to be a surgeon. As a matter of fact I operated on Dr. Wilson to-day. I—I am rather apologetic, Jack, because I didn’t explain to you sooner. For—various reasons—I gave up that—that line of business. To-day they rather forced my hand.”

“Don’t you think you could do something for me, sir?”

When K. did not reply at once, he launched into an explanation.

“I’ve been lying here a good while. I didn’t say much because I knew I’d have to take a chance. Either I’d pull through or I wouldn’t, and the odds were—well, I didn’t say much. The old lady’s had a lot of trouble. But now, with THIS under my pillow for her, I’ve got a right to ask. I’ll take a chance, if you will.”

“It’s only a chance, Jack.”

“I know that. But lie here and watch these soaks off the street. Old, a lot of them, and gettin’ well to go out and starve, and—My God! Mr. Le Moyne, they can walk, and I can’t.”

K. drew a long breath. He had started, and now he must go on. Faith in himself or no faith, he must go on. Life, that had loosed its hold on him for a time, had found him again.

“I’ll go over you carefully tomorrow, Jack. I’ll tell you your chances honestly.”

“I have a thousand dollars. Whatever you charge—”

“I’ll take it out of my board bill in the new house!”

At four o’clock that morning K. got back from seeing Joe off. The trip had been without accident.

Over Sidney’s letter Joe had shed a shamefaced tear or two. And during the night ride, with K. pushing the car to the utmost, he had felt that the boy, in keeping his hand in his pocket, had kept it on the letter. When the road was smooth and stretched ahead, a gray-white line into the night, he tried to talk a little courage into the boy’s sick heart.

“You’ll see new people, new life,” he said. “In a month from now you’ll wonder why you ever hung around the Street. I have a feeling that you’re going to make good down there.”

And once, when the time for parting was very near,—“No matter what happens, keep on believing in yourself. I lost my faith in myself once. It was pretty close to hell.”

Joe’s response showed his entire self-engrossment.

“If he dies, I’m a murderer.”

“He’s not going to die,” said K. stoutly.

At four o’clock in the morning he left the car at the garage and walked around to the little house. He had had no sleep for forty-five hours; his eyes were sunken in his head; the skin over his temples looked drawn and white. His clothes were wrinkled; the soft hat he habitually wore was white with the dust of the road.

As he opened the hall door, Christine stirred in the room beyond. She came out fully dressed.

“K., are you sick?”

“Rather tired. Why in the world aren’t you in bed?”

“Palmer has just come home in a terrible rage. He says he’s been robbed of a thousand dollars.”

“Where?”

Christine shrugged her shoulders.

“He doesn’t know, or says he doesn’t. I’m glad of it. He seems thoroughly frightened. It may be a lesson.”

In the dim hall light he realized that her face was strained and set. She looked on the verge of hysteria.

“Poor little woman,” he said. “I’m sorry, Christine.”

The tender words broke down the last barrier of her self-control.

“Oh, K.! Take me away. Take me away! I can’t stand it any longer.”

She held her arms out to him, and because he was very tired and lonely, and because more than anything else in the world just then he needed a woman’s arms, he drew her to him and held her close, his cheek to her hair.

“Poor girl!” he said. “Poor Christine! Surely there must be some happiness for us somewhere.”

But the next moment he let her go and stepped back.

“I’m sorry.” Characteristically he took the blame. “I shouldn’t have done that—You know how it is with me.”

“Will it always be Sidney?”

“I’m afraid it will always be Sidney.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

Johnny Rosenfeld was dead. All of K.‘s skill had not sufficed to save him. The operation had been a marvel, but the boy’s long-sapped strength failed at the last.

K., set of face, stayed with him to the end. The boy did not know he was going. He roused from the coma and smiled up at Le Moyne.

“I’ve got a hunch that I can move my right foot,” he said. “Look and see.”

K. lifted the light covering.

“You’re right, old man. It’s moving.”

“Brake foot, clutch foot,” said Johnny, and closed his eyes again.

K. had forbidden the white screens, that outward symbol of death. Time enough for them later. So the ward had no suspicion, nor had the boy.

The ward passed in review. It was Sunday, and from the chapel far below came the faint singing of a hymn. When Johnny spoke again he did not open his eyes.

“You’re some operator, Mr. Le Moyne. I’ll put in a word for you whenever I get a chance.”

“Yes, put in a word for me,” said K. huskily.

He felt that Johnny would be a good mediator—that whatever he, K., had done of omission or commission, Johnny’s voice before the Tribunal would count.

The lame young violin-player came into the ward. She had cherished a secret and romantic affection for Max Wilson, and now he was in the hospital and ill. So she wore the sacrificial air of a young nun and played “The Holy City.”

Johnny was close on the edge of his long sleep by that time, and very comfortable.

“Tell her nix on the sob stuff,” he complained. “Ask her to play ‘I’m twenty-one and she’s eighteen.’”

She was rather outraged, but on K.‘s quick explanation she changed to the staccato air.

“Ask her if she’ll come a little nearer; I can’t hear her.”

So she moved to the foot of the bed, and to the gay little tune Johnny began his long sleep. But first he asked K. a question: “Are you sure I’m going to walk, Mr. Le Moyne?”

“I give you my solemn word,” said K. huskily, “that you are going to be better than you have ever been in your life.”

It was K. who, seeing he would no longer notice, ordered the screens to be set around the bed, K. who drew the coverings smooth and folded the boy’s hands over his breast.

The violin-player stood by uncertainly.

“How very young he is! Was it an accident?”

“It was the result of a man’s damnable folly,” said K. grimly. “Somebody always pays.”

And so Johnny Rosenfeld paid.

The immediate result of his death was that K., who had gained some of his faith in himself on seeing Wilson on the way to recovery, was beset by his old doubts. What right had he to arrogate to himself again powers of life and death? Over and over he told himself that there had been no carelessness here, that the boy would have died ultimately, that he had taken the only chance, that the boy himself had known the risk and begged for it.

The old doubts came back.

And now came a question that demanded immediate answer. Wilson would be out of commission for several months, probably. He was gaining, but slowly. And he wanted K. to take over his work.

“Why not?” he demanded, half irritably. “The secret is out. Everybody knows who you are. You’re not thinking about going back to that ridiculous gas office, are you?”

“I had some thought of going to Cuba.”

“I’m damned if I understand you. You’ve done a marvelous thing; I lie here and listen to the staff singing your praises until I’m sick of your name! And now, because a boy who wouldn’t have lived anyhow—”

“That’s not it,” K. put in hastily. “I know all that. I guess I could do it and get away with it as well as the average. All that deters me—I’ve never told you, have I, why I gave up before?”

Wilson was propped up in his bed. K. was walking restlessly about the room, as was his habit when troubled.

“I’ve heard the gossip; that’s all.”

“When you recognized me that night on the balcony, I told you I’d lost my faith in myself, and you said the whole affair had been gone over at the State Society. As a matter of fact, the Society knew of only two cases. There had been three.”

“Even at that—”

“You know what I always felt about the profession, Max. We went into that more than once in Berlin. Either one’s best or nothing. I had done pretty well. When I left Lorch and built my own hospital, I hadn’t a doubt of myself. And because I was getting results I got a lot of advertising. Men began coming to the clinics. I found I was making enough out of the patients who could pay to add a few free wards. I want to tell you now, Wilson, that the opening of those free wards was the greatest self-indulgence I ever permitted myself. I’d seen so much careless attention given the poor—well, never mind that. It was almost three years ago that things began to go wrong. I lost a big case.”

“I know. All this doesn’t influence me, Edwardes.”

“Wait a moment. We had a system in the operating-room as perfect as I could devise it. I never finished an operation without having my first assistant verify the clip and sponge count. But that first case died because a sponge had been left in the operating field. You know how those things go; you can’t always see them, and one goes by the count, after reasonable caution. Then I lost another case in the same way—a free case.

“As well as I could tell, the precautions had not been relaxed. I was doing from four to six cases a day. After the second one I almost went crazy. I made up my mind, if there was ever another, I’d give up and go away.”

“There was another?”

“Not for several months. When the last case died, a free case again, I performed my own autopsy. I allowed only my first assistant in the room. He was almost as frenzied as I was. It was the same thing again. When I told him I was going away, he offered to take the blame himself, to say he had closed the incision. He tried to make me think he was responsible. I knew—better.”

“It’s incredible.”

“Exactly; but it’s true. The last patient was a laborer. He left a family. I’ve sent them money from time to time. I used to sit and think about the children he left, and what would become of them. The ironic part of it was that, for all that had happened, I was busier all the time. Men were sending me cases from all over the country. It was either stay and keep on working, with that chance, or—quit. I quit.” “But if you had stayed, and taken extra precautions—”

“We’d taken every precaution we knew.”

Neither of the men spoke for a time. K. stood, his tall figure outlined against the window. Far off, in the children’s ward, children were laughing; from near by a very young baby wailed a thin cry of protest against life; a bell rang constantly. K.‘s mind was busy with the past—with the day he decided to give up and go away, with the months of wandering and homelessness, with the night he had come upon the Street and had seen Sidney on the doorstep of the little house.

“That’s the worst, is it?” Max Wilson demanded at last.

“That’s enough.”

“It’s extremely significant. You had an enemy somewhere—on your staff, probably. This profession of ours is a big one, but you know its jealousies. Let a man get his shoulders above the crowd, and the pack is after him.” He laughed a little. “Mixed figure, but you know what I mean.”

K. shook his head. He had had that gift of the big man everywhere, in every profession, of securing the loyalty of his followers. He would have trusted every one of them with his life.

“You’re going to do it, of course.”

“Take up your work?”

“Yes.”

He stirred restlessly. To stay on, to be near Sidney, perhaps to stand by as Wilson’s best man when he was married—it turned him cold. But he did not give a decided negative. The sick man was flushed and growing fretful; it would not do to irritate him.

“Give me another day on it,” he said at last. And so the matter stood.

Max’s injury had been productive of good, in one way. It had brought the two brothers closer together. In the mornings Max was restless until Dr. Ed arrived. When he came, he brought books in the shabby bag—his beloved Burns, although he needed no book for that, the “Pickwick Papers,” Renan’s “Lives of the Disciples.” Very often Max world doze off; at the cessation of Dr. Ed’s sonorous voice the sick man would stir fretfully and demand more. But because he listened to everything without discrimination, the older man came to the conclusion that it was the companionship that counted. It pleased him vastly. It reminded him of Max’s boyhood, when he had read to Max at night. For once in the last dozen years, he needed him.

“Go on, Ed. What in blazes makes you stop every five minutes?” Max protested, one day.

Dr. Ed, who had only stopped to bite off the end of a stogie to hold in his cheek, picked up his book in a hurry, and eyed the invalid over it.

“Stop bullying. I’ll read when I’m ready. Have you any idea what I’m reading?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I haven’t. For ten minutes I’ve been reading across both pages!”

Max laughed, and suddenly put out his hand. Demonstrations of affection were so rare with him that for a moment Dr. Ed was puzzled. Then, rather sheepishly, he took it.

“When I get out,” Max said, “we’ll have to go out to the White Springs again and have supper.”

That was all; but Ed understood.

Morning and evening, Sidney went to Max’s room. In the morning she only smiled at him from the doorway. In the evening she went to him after prayers. She was allowed an hour with him then.

The shooting had been a closed book between them. At first, when he began to recover, he tried to talk to her about it. But she refused to listen. She was very gentle with him, but very firm.

“I know how it happened, Max,” she said—“about Joe’s mistake and all that. The rest can wait until you are much better.”

If there had been any change in her manner to him, he would not have submitted so easily, probably. But she was as tender as ever, unfailingly patient, prompt to come to him and slow to leave. After a time he began to dread reopening the subject. She seemed so effectually to have closed it. Carlotta was gone. And, after all, what good could he do his cause by pleading it? The fact was there, and Sidney knew it.

On the day when K. had told Max his reason for giving up his work, Max was allowed out of bed for the first time. It was a great day. A box of red roses came that day from the girl who had refused him a year or more ago. He viewed them with a carelessness that was half assumed.

The news had traveled to the Street that he was to get up that day. Early that morning the doorkeeper had opened the door to a gentleman who did not speak, but who handed in a bunch of early chrysanthemums and proceeded to write, on a pad he drew from his pocket:—

“From Mrs. McKee’s family and guests, with their congratulations on your recovery, and their hope that they will see you again soon. If their ends are clipped every day and they are placed in ammonia water, they will last indefinitely.” Sidney spent her hour with Max that evening as usual. His big chair had been drawn close to a window, and she found him there, looking out. She kissed him. But this time, instead of letting her draw away, he put out his arms and caught her to him.

“Are you glad?”

“Very glad, indeed,” she said soberly.

“Then smile at me. You don’t smile any more. You ought to smile; your mouth—”

“I am almost always tired; that’s all, Max.”

She eyed him bravely.

“Aren’t you going to let me make love to you at all? You get away beyond my reach.”

“I was looking for the paper to read to you.”

A sudden suspicion flamed in his eyes.

“Sidney.”

“Yes, dear.”

“You don’t like me to touch you any more. Come here where I can see you.”

The fear of agitating him brought her quickly. For a moment he was appeased.

“That’s more like it. How lovely you are, Sidney!” He lifted first one hand and then the other to his lips. “Are you ever going to forgive me?”

“If you mean about Carlotta, I forgave that long ago.”

He was almost boyishly relieved. What a wonder she was! So lovely, and so sane. Many a woman would have held that over him for years—not that he had done anything really wrong on that nightmare excursion. But so many women are exigent about promises.

“When are you going to marry me?”

“We needn’t discuss that tonight, Max.”

“I want you so very much. I don’t want to wait, dear. Let me tell Ed that you will marry me soon. Then, when I go away, I’ll take you with me.”

“Can’t we talk things over when you are stronger?”

Her tone caught his attention, and turned him a little white. He faced her to the window, so that the light fell full on her.

“What things? What do you mean?”

He had forced her hand. She had meant to wait; but, with his keen eyes on her, she could not dissemble.

“I am going to make you very unhappy for a little while.”

“Well?”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. If you had really wanted me, Max—”

“My God, of course I want you!”

“It isn’t that I am angry. I am not even jealous. I was at first. It isn’t that. It’s hard to make you understand. I think you care for me—”

“I love you! I swear I never loved any other woman as I love you.”

Suddenly he remembered that he had also sworn to put Carlotta out of his life. He knew that Sidney remembered, too; but she gave no sign.

“Perhaps that’s true. You might go on caring for me. Sometimes I think you would. But there would always be other women, Max. You’re like that. Perhaps you can’t help it.”

“If you loved me you could do anything with me.” He was half sullen.

By the way her color leaped, he knew he had struck fire. All his conjectures as to how Sidney would take the knowledge of his entanglement with Carlotta had been founded on one major premise—that she loved him. The mere suspicion made him gasp.

“But, good Heavens, Sidney, you do care for me, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t, Max; not enough.”

She tried to explain, rather pitifully. After one look at his face, she spoke to the window.

“I’m so wretched about it. I thought I cared. To me you were the best and greatest man that ever lived. I—when I said my prayers, I—But that doesn’t matter. You were a sort of god to me. When the Lamb—that’s one of the internes, you know—nicknamed you the ‘Little Tin God,’ I was angry. You could never be anything little to me, or do anything that wasn’t big. Do you see?”

He groaned under his breath.

“No man could live up to that, Sidney.”

“No. I see that now. But that’s the way I cared. Now I know that I didn’t care for you, really, at all. I built up an idol and worshiped it. I always saw you through a sort of haze. You were operating, with everybody standing by, saying how wonderful it was. Or you were coming to the wards, and everything was excitement, getting ready for you. I blame myself terribly. But you see, don’t you? It isn’t that I think you are wicked. It’s just that I never loved the real you, because I never knew you.”

When he remained silent, she made an attempt to justify herself.

“I’d known very few men,” she said. “I came into the hospital, and for a time life seemed very terrible. There were wickednesses I had never heard of, and somebody always paying for them. I was always asking, Why? Why? Then you would come in, and a lot of them you cured and sent out. You gave them their chance, don’t you see? Until I knew about Carlotta, you always meant that to me. You were like K.—always helping.”

The room was very silent. In the nurses’ parlor, a few feet down the corridor, the nurses were at prayers.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” read the Head, her voice calm with the quiet of twilight and the end of the day.

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

The nurses read the response a little slowly, as if they, too, were weary.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—”

The man in the chair stirred. He had come through the valley of the shadow, and for what? He was very bitter. He said to himself savagely that they would better have let him die. “You say you never loved me because you never knew me. I’m not a rotter, Sidney. Isn’t it possible that the man you, cared about, who—who did his best by people and all that—is the real me?”

She gazed at him thoughtfully. He missed something out of her eyes, the sort of luminous, wistful look with which she had been wont to survey his greatness. Measured by this new glance, so clear, so appraising, he sank back into his chair.

“The man who did his best is quite real. You have always done the best in your work; you always will. But the other is a part of you too, Max. Even if I cared, I would not dare to run the risk.”

Under the window rang the sharp gong of a city patrol-wagon. It rumbled through the gates back to the courtyard, where its continued clamor summoned white-coated orderlies.

An operating-room case, probably. Sidney, chin lifted, listened carefully. If it was a case for her, the elevator would go up to the operating-room. With a renewed sense of loss, Max saw that already she had put him out of her mind. The call to service was to her a call to battle. Her sensitive nostrils quivered; her young figure stood erect, alert.

“It has gone up!”

She took a step toward the door, hesitated, came back, and put a light hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, dear Max.”

She had kissed him lightly on the cheek before he knew what she intended to do. So passionless was the little caress that, perhaps more than anything else, it typified the change in their relation.

When the door closed behind her, he saw that she had left her ring on the arm of his chair. He picked it up. It was still warm from her finger. He held it to his lips with a quick gesture. In all his successful young life he had never before felt the bitterness of failure. The very warmth of the little ring hurt.

Why hadn’t they let him die? He didn’t want to live—he wouldn’t live. Nobody cared for him! He would—

His eyes, lifted from the ring, fell on the red glow of the roses that had come that morning. Even in the half light, they glowed with fiery color.

The ring was in his right hand. With the left he settled his collar and soft silk tie.

K. saw Carlotta that evening for the last time. Katie brought word to him, where he was helping Harriet close her trunk,—she was on her way to Europe for the fall styles,—that he was wanted in the lower hall.

“A lady!” she said, closing the door behind her by way of caution. “And a good thing for her she’s not from the alley. The way those people beg off you is a sin and a shame, and it’s not at home you’re going to be to them from now on.”

So K. had put on his coat and, without so much as a glance in Harriet’s mirror, had gone down the stairs. Carlotta was in the lower hall. She stood under the chandelier, and he saw at once the ravages that trouble had made in her. She was a dead white, and she looked ten years older than her age.

“I came, you see, Dr. Edwardes.”

Now and then, when some one came to him for help, which was generally money, he used Christine’s parlor, if she happened to be out. So now, finding the door ajar, and the room dark, he went in and turned on the light.

“Come in here; we can talk better.”

She did not sit down at first; but, observing that her standing kept him on his feet, she sat finally. Evidently she found it hard to speak.

“You were to come,” K. encouraged her, “to see if we couldn’t plan something for you. Now, I think I’ve got it.”

“If it’s another hospital—and I don’t want to stay here, in the city.”

“You like surgical work, don’t you?”

“I don’t care for anything else.”

“Before we settle this, I’d better tell you what I’m thinking of. You know, of course, that I closed my hospital. I—a series of things happened, and I decided I was in the wrong business. That wouldn’t be important, except for what it leads to. They are trying to persuade me to go back, and—I’m trying to persuade myself that I’m fit to go back. You see,”—his tone was determinedly cheerful, “my faith in myself has been pretty nearly gone. When one loses that, there isn’t much left.”

“You had been very successful.” She did not look up.

“Well, I had and I hadn’t. I’m not going to worry you about that. My offer is this: We’ll just try to forget about—about Schwitter’s and all the rest, and if I go back I’ll take you on in the operating-room.”

“You sent me away once!”

“Well, I can ask you to come back, can’t I?” He smiled at her encouragingly.

“Are you sure you understand about Max Wilson and myself?”

“I understand.”

“Don’t you think you are taking a risk?”

“Every one makes mistakes now and then, and loving women have made mistakes since the world began. Most people live in glass houses, Miss Harrison. And don’t make any mistake about this: people can always come back. No depth is too low. All they need is the willpower.”

He smiled down at her. She had come armed with confession. But the offer he made was too alluring. It meant reinstatement, another chance, when she had thought everything was over. After all, why should she damn herself? She would go back. She would work her finger-ends off for him. She would make it up to him in other ways. But she could not tell him and lose everything.

“Come,” he said. “Shall we go back and start over again?”

He held out his hand.

CHAPTER XXIX

Late September had come, with the Street, after its summer indolence taking up the burden of the year. At eight-thirty and at one the school bell called the children. Little girls in pig-tails, carrying freshly sharpened pencils, went primly toward the school, gathering, comet fashion, a tail of unwilling brothers as they went.

An occasional football hurtled through the air. Le Moyne had promised the baseball club a football outfit, rumor said, but would not coach them himself this year. A story was going about that Mr. Le Moyne intended to go away.

The Street had been furiously busy for a month. The cobblestones had gone, and from curb to curb stretched smooth asphalt. The fascination of writing on it with chalk still obsessed the children. Every few yards was a hop-scotch diagram. Generally speaking, too, the Street had put up new curtains, and even, here and there, had added a coat of paint.

To this general excitement the strange case of Mr. Le Moyne had added its quota. One day he was in the gas office, making out statements that were absolutely ridiculous. (What with no baking all last month, and every Sunday spent in the country, nobody could have used that amount of gas. They could come and take their old meter out!) And the next there was the news that Mr. Le Moyne had been only taking a holiday in the gas office,—paying off old scores, the barytone at Mrs. McKee’s hazarded!—and that he was really a very great surgeon and had saved Dr. Max Wilson.

The Street, which was busy at the time deciding whether to leave the old sidewalks or to put down cement ones, had one evening of mad excitement over the matter,—of K., not the sidewalks,—and then had accepted the new situation.

But over the news of K.‘s approaching departure it mourned. What was the matter with things, anyhow? Here was Christine’s marriage, which had promised so well,—awnings and palms and everything,—turning out badly. True, Palmer Howe was doing better, but he would break out again. And Johnny Rosenfeld was dead, so that his mother came on washing-days, and brought no cheery gossip; but bent over her tubs dry-eyed and silent—even the approaching move to a larger house failed to thrill her. There was Tillie, too. But one did not speak of her. She was married now, of course; but the Street did not tolerate such a reversal of the usual processes as Tillie had indulged in. It censured Mrs. McKee severely for having been, so to speak, and accessory after the fact.

The Street made a resolve to keep K., if possible. If he had shown any “high and mightiness,” as they called it, since the change in his estate, it would have let him go without protest. But when a man is the real thing,—so that the newspapers give a column to his having been in the city almost two years,—and still goes about in the same shabby clothes, with the same friendly greeting for every one, it demonstrates clearly, as the barytone put it, that “he’s got no swelled head on him; that’s sure.”

“Anybody can see by the way he drives that machine of Wilson’s that he’s been used to a car—likely a foreign one. All the swells have foreign cars.” Still the barytone, who was almost as fond of conversation as of what he termed “vocal.” “And another thing. Do you notice the way he takes Dr. Ed around? Has him at every consultation. The old boy’s tickled to death.”

A little later, K., coming up the Street as he had that first day, heard the barytone singing:—

“Home is the hunter, home from the hill, And the sailor, home from sea.”

Home! Why, this WAS home. The Street seemed to stretch out its arms to him. The ailanthus tree waved in the sunlight before the little house. Tree and house were old; September had touched them. Christine sat sewing on the balcony. A boy with a piece of chalk was writing something on the new cement under the tree. He stood back, head on one side, when he had finished, and inspected his work. K. caught him up from behind, and, swinging him around—

“Hey!” he said severely. “Don’t you know better than to write all over the street? What’ll I do to you? Give you to a policeman?”

“Aw, lemme down, Mr. K.”

“You tell the boys that if I find this street scrawled over any more, the picnic’s off.”

“Aw, Mr. K.!”

“I mean it. Go and spend some of that chalk energy of yours in school.”

He put the boy down. There was a certain tenderness in his hands, as in his voice, when he dealt with children. All his severity did not conceal it. “Get along with you, Bill. Last bell’s rung.”

As the boy ran off, K.‘s eye fell on what he had written on the cement. At a certain part of his career, the child of such a neighborhood as the Street “cancels” names. It is a part of his birthright. He does it as he whittles his school desk or tries to smoke the long dried fruit of the Indian cigar tree. So K. read in chalk an the smooth street:—

Max Wilson Marriage. Sidney Page Love.

[Note: the a, l, s, and n of “Max Wilson” are crossed through, as are the S, d, n, and a of “Sidney Page”]

The childish scrawl stared up at him impudently, a sacred thing profaned by the day. K. stood and looked at it. The barytone was still singing; but now it was “I’m twenty-one, and she’s eighteen.” It was a cheerful air, as should be the air that had accompanied Johnny Rosenfeld to his long sleep. The light was gone from K.‘s face again. After all, the Street meant for him not so much home as it meant Sidney. And now, before very long, that book of his life, like others, would have to be closed.

He turned and went heavily into the little house.

Christine called to him from her little balcony:—

“I thought I heard your step outside. Have you time to come out?”

K. went through the parlor and stood in the long window. His steady eyes looked down at her.

“I see very little of you now,” she complained. And, when he did not reply immediately: “Have you made any definite plans, K.?”

“I shall do Max’s work until he is able to take hold again. After that—”

“You will go away?”

“I think so. I am getting a good many letters, one way and another. I suppose, now I’m back in harness, I’ll stay. My old place is closed. I’d go back there—they want me. But it seems so futile, Christine, to leave as I did, because I felt that I had no right to go on as things were; and now to crawl back on the strength of having had my hand forced, and to take up things again, not knowing that I’ve a bit more right to do it than when I left!”

“I went to see Max yesterday. You know what he thinks about all that.”

He took an uneasy turn up and down the balcony.

“But who?” he demanded. “Who would do such a thing? I tell you, Christine, it isn’t possible.”

She did not pursue the subject. Her thoughts had flown ahead to the little house without K., to days without his steps on the stairs or the heavy creak of his big chair overhead as he dropped into it.

But perhaps it would be better if he went. She had her own life to live. She had no expectation of happiness, but, somehow or other, she must build on the shaky foundation of her marriage a house of life, with resignation serving for content, perhaps with fear lurking always. That she knew. But with no active misery. Misery implied affection, and her love for Palmer was quite dead.

“Sidney will be here this afternoon.”

“Good.” His tone was non-committal.

“Has it occurred to you, K., that Sidney is not very happy?”

He stopped in front of her.

“She’s had a great anxiety.”

“She has no anxiety now. Max is doing well.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m not quite sure, but I think I know. She’s lost faith in Max, and she’s not like me. I—I knew about Palmer before I married him. I got a letter. It’s all rather hideous—I needn’t go into it. I was afraid to back out; it was just before my wedding. But Sidney has more character than I have. Max isn’t what she thought he was, and I doubt whether she’ll marry him.”

K. glanced toward the street where Sidney’s name and Max’s lay open to the sun and to the smiles of the Street. Christine might be right, but that did not alter things for him.

Christine’s thoughts went back inevitably to herself; to Palmer, who was doing better just now; to K., who was going away—went back with an ache to the night K. had taken her in his arms and then put her away. How wrong things were! What a mess life was!

“When you go away,” she said at last, “I want you to remember this. I’m going to do my best, K. You have taught me all I know. All my life I’ll have to overlook things; I know that. But, in his way, Palmer cares for me. He will always come back, and perhaps sometime—”

Her voice trailed off. Far ahead of her she saw the years stretching out, marked, not by days and months, but by Palmer’s wanderings away, his remorseful returns.

“Do a little more than forgetting,” K. said. “Try to care for him, Christine. You did once. And that’s your strongest weapon. It’s always a woman’s strongest weapon. And it wins in the end.”

“I shall try, K.,” she answered obediently.

But he turned away from the look in her eyes.

Harriet was abroad. She had sent cards from Paris to her “trade.” It was an innovation. The two or three people on the Street who received her engraved announcement that she was there, “buying new chic models for the autumn and winter—afternoon frocks, evening gowns, reception dresses, and wraps, from Poiret, Martial et Armand, and others,” left the envelopes casually on the parlor table, as if communications from Paris were quite to be expected.

So K. lunched alone, and ate little. After luncheon he fixed a broken ironing-stand for Katie, and in return she pressed a pair of trousers for him. He had it in mind to ask Sidney to go out with him in Max’s car, and his most presentable suit was very shabby.

“I’m thinking,” said Katie, when she brought the pressed garments up over her arm and passed them in through a discreet crack in the door, “that these pants will stand more walking than sitting, Mr. K. They’re getting mighty thin.”

“I’ll take a duster along in case of accident,” he promised her; “and tomorrow I’ll order a suit, Katie.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Katie from the stairs. “Some fool of a woman from the alley will come in tonight and tell you she can’t pay her rent, and she’ll take your suit away in her pocket-book—as like as not to pay an installment on a piano. There’s two new pianos in the alley since you came here.”

“I promise it, Katie.”

“Show it to me,” said Katie laconically. “And don’t go to picking up anything you drop!”

Sidney came home at half-past two—came delicately flushed, as if she had hurried, and with a tremulous smile that caught Katie’s eye at once.

“Bless the child!” she said. “There’s no need to ask how he is to-day. You’re all one smile.”

The smile set just a trifle.

“Katie, some one has written my name out on the street, in chalk. It’s with Dr. Wilson’s, and it looks so silly. Please go out and sweep it off.”

“I’m about crazy with their old chalk. I’ll do it after a while.”

“Please do it now. I don’t want anyone to see it. Is—is Mr. K. upstairs?”

But when she learned that K. was upstairs, oddly enough, she did not go up at once. She stood in the lower hall and listened. Yes, he was there. She could hear him moving about. Her lips parted slightly as she listened.

Christine, looking in from her balcony, saw her there, and, seeing something in her face that she had never suspected, put her hand to her throat.

“Sidney!”

“Oh—hello, Chris.”

“Won’t you come and sit with me?”

“I haven’t much time—that is, I want to speak to K.”

“You can see him when he comes down.”

Sidney came slowly through the parlor. It occurred to her, all at once, that Christine must see a lot of K., especially now. No doubt he was in and out of the house often. And how pretty Christine was! She was unhappy, too. All that seemed to be necessary to win K.‘s attention was to be unhappy enough. Well, surely, in that case—

“How is Max?”

“Still better.”

Sidney sat down on the edge of the railing; but she was careful, Christine saw, to face the staircase. There was silence on the balcony. Christine sewed; Sidney sat and swung her feet idly.

“Dr. Ed says Max wants you to give up your training and marry him now.”

“I’m not going to marry him at all, Chris.”

Upstairs, K.‘s door slammed. It was one of his failings that he always slammed doors. Harriet used to be quite disagreeable about it.

Sidney slid from the railing.

“There he is now.”

Perhaps, in all her frivolous, selfish life, Christine had never had a bigger moment than the one that followed. She could have said nothing, and, in the queer way that life goes, K. might have gone away from the Street as empty of heart as he had come to it.

“Be very good to him, Sidney,” she said unsteadily. “He cares so much.”

CHAPTER XXX

K. was being very dense. For so long had he considered Sidney as unattainable that now his masculine mind, a little weary with much wretchedness, refused to move from its old attitude.

“It was glamour, that was all, K.,” said Sidney bravely.

“But, perhaps,” said K., “it’s just because of that miserable incident with Carlotta. That wasn’t the right thing, of course, but Max has told me the story. It was really quite innocent. She fainted in the yard, and—”

Sidney was exasperated.

“Do you want me to marry him, K.?”

K. looked straight ahead.

“I want you to be happy, dear.”

They were on the terrace of the White Springs Hotel again. K. had ordered dinner, making a great to-do about getting the dishes they both liked. But now that it was there, they were not eating. K. had placed his chair so that his profile was turned toward her. He had worn the duster religiously until nightfall, and then had discarded it. It hung limp and dejected on the back of his chair. Past K.‘s profile Sidney could see the magnolia tree shaped like a heart.

“It seems to me,” said Sidney suddenly, “that you are kind to every one but me, K.”

He fairly stammered his astonishment:—

“Why, what on earth have I done?”

“You are trying to make me marry Max, aren’t you?”

She was very properly ashamed of that, and, when he failed of reply out of sheer inability to think of one that would not say too much, she went hastily to something else:

“It is hard for me to realize that you—that you lived a life of your own, a busy life, doing useful things, before you came to us. I wish you would tell me something about yourself. If we’re to be friends when you go away,”—she had to stop there, for the lump in her throat—“I’ll want to know how to think of you,—who your friends are,—all that.”

He made an effort. He was thinking, of course, that he would be visualizing her, in the hospital, in the little house on its side street, as she looked just then, her eyes like stars, her lips just parted, her hands folded before her on the table.

“I shall be working,” he said at last. “So will you.”

“Does that mean you won’t have time to think of me?”

“I’m afraid I’m stupider than usual tonight. You can think of me as never forgetting you or the Street, working or playing.”

Playing! Of course he would not work all the time. And he was going back to his old friends, to people who had always known him, to girls—

He did his best then. He told her of the old family house, built by one of his forebears who had been a king’s man until Washington had put the case for the colonies, and who had given himself and his oldest son then to the cause that he made his own. He told of old servants who had wept when he decided to close the house and go away. When she fell silent, he thought he was interesting her. He told her the family traditions that had been the fairy tales of his childhood. He described the library, the choice room of the house, full of family paintings in old gilt frames, and of his father’s collection of books. Because it was home, he waxed warm over it at last, although it had rather hurt him at first to remember. It brought back the other things that he wanted to forget.

But a terrible thing was happening to Sidney. Side by side with the wonders he described so casually, she was placing the little house. What an exile it must have been for him! How hopelessly middle-class they must have seemed! How idiotic of her to think, for one moment, that she could ever belong in this new-old life of his!

What traditions had she? None, of course, save to be honest and good and to do her best for the people around her. Her mother’s people, the Kennedys went back a long way, but they had always been poor. A library full of paintings and books! She remembered the lamp with the blue-silk shade, the figure of Eve that used to stand behind the minister’s portrait, and the cherry bookcase with the Encyclopaedia in it and “Beacon Lights of History.” When K., trying his best to interest her and to conceal his own heaviness of spirit, told her of his grandfather’s old carriage, she sat back in the shadow.

“Fearful old thing,” said K.,—“regular cabriolet. I can remember yet the family rows over it. But the old gentleman liked it—used to have it repainted every year. Strangers in the city used to turn around and stare at it—thought it was advertising something!”

“When I was a child,” said Sidney quietly, “and a carriage drove up and stopped on the Street, I always knew some one had died!”

There was a strained note in her voice. K., whose ear was attuned to every note in her voice, looked at her quickly. “My great-grandfather,” said Sidney in the same tone, “sold chickens at market. He didn’t do it himself; but the fact’s there, isn’t it?”

K. was puzzled.

“What about it?” he said.

But Sidney’s agile mind had already traveled on. This K. she had never known, who had lived in a wonderful house, and all the rest of it—he must have known numbers of lovely women, his own sort of women, who had traveled and knew all kinds of things: girls like the daughters of the Executive Committee who came in from their country places in summer with great armfuls of flowers, and hurried off, after consulting their jeweled watches, to luncheon or tea or tennis.

“Go on,” said Sidney dully. “Tell me about the women you have known, your friends, the ones you liked and the ones who liked you.”

K. was rather apologetic.

“I’ve always been so busy,” he confessed. “I know a lot, but I don’t think they would interest you. They don’t do anything, you know—they travel around and have a good time. They’re rather nice to look at, some of them. But when you’ve said that you’ve said it all.”

Nice to look at! Of course they would be, with nothing else to think of in all the world but of how they looked.

Suddenly Sidney felt very tired. She wanted to go back to the hospital, and turn the key in the door of her little room, and lie with her face down on the bed.

“Would you mind very much if I asked you to take me back?”

He did mind. He had a depressed feeling that the evening had failed. And his depression grew as he brought the car around. He understood, he thought. She was grieving about Max. After all, a girl couldn’t care as she had for a year and a half, and then give a man up because of another woman, without a wrench.

“Do you really want to go home, Sidney, or were you tired of sitting there? In that case, we could drive around for an hour or two. I’ll not talk if you’d like to be quiet.” Being with K. had become an agony, now that she realized how wrong Christine had been, and that their worlds, hers and K.‘s, had only touched for a time. Soon they would be separated by as wide a gulf as that which lay between the cherry bookcase—for instance,—and a book-lined library hung with family portraits. But she was not disposed to skimp as to agony. She would go through with it, every word a stab, if only she might sit beside K. a little longer, might feel the touch of his old gray coat against her arm. “I’d like to ride, if you don’t mind.”

K. turned the automobile toward the country roads. He was remembering acutely that other ride after Joe in his small car, the trouble he had had to get a machine, the fear of he knew not what ahead, and his arrival at last at the roadhouse, to find Max lying at the head of the stairs and Carlotta on her knees beside him.

“K.” “Yes?”

“Was there anybody you cared about,—any girl,—when you left home?”

“I was not in love with anyone, if that’s what you mean.”

“You knew Max before, didn’t you?”

“Yes. You know that.”

“If you knew things about him that I should have known, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t do that, could I? Anyhow—”

“Yes?”

“I thought everything would be all right. It seemed to me that the mere fact of your caring for him—” That was shaky ground; he got off it quickly. “Schwitter has closed up. Do you want to stop there?”

“Not tonight, please.”

They were near the white house now. Schwitter’s had closed up, indeed. The sign over the entrance was gone. The lanterns had been taken down, and in the dusk they could see Tillie rocking her baby on the porch. As if to cover the last traces of his late infamy, Schwitter himself was watering the worn places on the lawn with the garden can.

The car went by. Above the low hum of the engine they could hear Tillie’s voice, flat and unmusical, but filled with the harmonies of love as she sang to the child.

When they had left the house far behind, K. was suddenly aware that Sidney was crying. She sat with her head turned away, using her handkerchief stealthily. He drew the car up beside the road, and in a masterful fashion turned her shoulders about until she faced him.

“Now, tell me about it,” he said.

“It’s just silliness. I’m—I’m a little bit lonely.”

“Lonely!”

“Aunt Harriet’s in Paris, and with Joe gone and everybody—”

“Aunt Harriet!”

He was properly dazed, for sure. If she had said she was lonely because the cherry bookcase was in Paris, he could not have been more bewildered. And Joe! “And with you going away and never coming back—”

“I’ll come back, of course. How’s this? I’ll promise to come back when you graduate, and send you flowers.”

“I think,” said Sidney, “that I’ll become an army nurse.”

“I hope you won’t do that.”

“You won’t know, K. You’ll be back with your old friends. You’ll have forgotten the Street and all of us.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Girls who have been everywhere, and have lovely clothes, and who won’t know a T bandage from a figure eight!”

“There will never be anybody in the world like you to me, dear.”

His voice was husky.

“You are saying that to comfort me.”

“To comfort you! I—who have wanted you so long that it hurts even to think about it! Ever since the night I came up the Street, and you were sitting there on the steps—oh, my dear, my dear, if you only cared a little!”

Because he was afraid that he would get out of hand and take her in his arms,—which would be idiotic, since, of course, she did not care for him that way,—he gripped the steering-wheel. It gave him a curious appearance of making a pathetic appeal to the wind-shield.

“I have been trying to make you say that all evening!” said Sidney. “I love you so much that—K., won’t you take me in your arms?”

Take her in his arms! He almost crushed her. He held her to him and muttered incoherencies until she gasped. It was as if he must make up for long arrears of hopelessness. He held her off a bit to look at her, as if to be sure it was she and no changeling, and as if he wanted her eyes to corroborate her lips. There was no lack of confession in her eyes; they showed him a new heaven and a new earth.

“It was you always, K.,” she confessed. “I just didn’t realize it. But now, when you look back, don’t you see it was?”

He looked back over the months when she had seemed as unattainable as the stars, and he did not see it. He shook his head.

“I never had even a hope.”

“Not when I came to you with everything? I brought you all my troubles, and you always helped.”

Her eyes filled. She bent down and kissed one of his hands. He was so happy that the foolish little caress made his heart hammer in his ears.

“I think, K., that is how one can always tell when it is the right one, and will be the right one forever and ever. It is the person—one goes to in trouble.”

He had no words for that, only little caressing touches of her arm, her hand. Perhaps, without knowing it, he was formulating a sort of prayer that, since there must be troubles, she would, always come to him and he would always be able to help her.

And Sidney, too, fell silent. She was recalling the day she became engaged to Max, and the lost feeling she had had. She did not feel the same at all now. She felt as if she had been wandering, and had come home to the arms that were about her. She would be married, and take the risk that all women took, with her eyes open. She would go through the valley of the shadow, as other women did; but K. would be with her. Nothing else mattered. Looking into his steady eyes, she knew that she was safe. She would never wither for him.

Where before she had felt the clutch of inexorable destiny, the woman’s fate, now she felt only his arms about her, her cheek on his shabby coat.

“I shall love you all my life,” she said shakily.

His arms tightened about her.

The little house was dark when they got back to it. The Street, which had heard that Mr. Le Moyne approved of night air, was raising its windows for the night and pinning cheesecloth bags over its curtains to keep them clean.

In the second-story front room at Mrs. McKee’s, the barytone slept heavily, and made divers unvocal sounds. He was hardening his throat, and so slept with a wet towel about it.

Down on the doorstep, Mrs. McKee and Mr. Wagner sat and made love with the aid of a lighted match and the pencil-pad.

The car drew up at the little house, and Sidney got out. Then it drove away, for K. must take it to the garage and walk back.

Sidney sat on the doorstep and waited. How lovely it all was! How beautiful life was! If one did one’s best by life, it did its best too. How steady K.‘s eyes were! She saw the flicker of the match across the street, and knew what it meant. Once she would have thought that that was funny; now it seemed very touching to her.

Katie had heard the car, and now she came heavily along the hall. “A woman left this for Mr. K.,” she said. “If you think it’s a begging letter, you’d better keep it until he’s bought his new suit tomorrow. Almost any moment he’s likely to bust out.”

But it was not a begging letter. K. read it in the hall, with Sidney’s shining eyes on him. It began abruptly:—

“I’m going to Africa with one of my cousins. She is a medical missionary. Perhaps I can work things out there. It is a bad station on the West Coast. I am not going because I feel any call to the work, but because I do not know what else to do.

“You were kind to me the other day. I believe, if I had told you then, you would still have been kind. I tried to tell you, but I was so terribly afraid.

“If I caused death, I did not mean to. You will think that no excuse, but it is true. In the hospital, when I changed the bottles on Miss Page’s medicine-tray, I did not care much what happened. But it was different with you.

“You dismissed me, you remember. I had been careless about a sponge count. I made up my mind to get back at you. It seemed hopeless—you were so secure. For two or three days I tried to think of some way to hurt you. I almost gave up. Then I found the way.

“You remember the packets of gauze sponges we made and used in the operating-room? There were twelve to each package. When we counted them as we got them out, we counted by packages. On the night before I left, I went to the operating-room and added one sponge every here and there. Out of every dozen packets, perhaps, I fixed one that had thirteen. The next day I went away.

“Then I was terrified. What if somebody died? I had meant to give you trouble, so you would have to do certain cases a second time. I swear that was all. I was so frightened that I went down sick over it. When I got better, I heard you had lost a case and the cause was being whispered about. I almost died of terror.

“I tried to get back into the hospital one night. I went up the fire-escape, but the windows were locked. Then I left the city. I couldn’t stand it. I was afraid to read a newspaper.

“I am not going to sign this letter. You know who it is from. And I am not going to ask your forgiveness, or anything of that sort. I don’t expect it. But one thing hurt me more than anything else, the other night. You said you’d lost your faith in yourself. This is to tell you that you need not. And you said something else—that any one can ‘come back.’ I wonder!”

K. stood in the hall of the little house with the letter in his hand. Just beyond on the doorstep was Sidney, waiting for him. His arms were still warm from the touch of her. Beyond lay the Street, and beyond that lay the world and a man’s work to do. Work, and faith to do it, a good woman’s hand in the dark, a Providence that made things right in the end.

“Are you coming, K.?”

“Coming,” he said. And, when he was beside her, his long figure folded to the short measure of the step, he stooped humbly and kissed the hem of her soft white dress.

Across the Street, Mr. Wagner wrote something in the dark and then lighted a match.

“So K. is in love with Sidney Page, after all!” he had written. “She is a sweet girl, and he is every inch a man. But, to my mind, a certain lady—”

Mrs. McKee flushed and blew out the match.

Late September now on the Street, with Joe gone and his mother eyeing the postman with pitiful eagerness; with Mrs. Rosenfeld moving heavily about the setting-up of the new furniture; and with Johnny driving heavenly cars, brake and clutch legs well and Strong. Late September, with Max recovering and settling his tie for any pretty nurse who happened along, but listening eagerly for Dr. Ed’s square tread in the hall; with Tillie rocking her baby on the porch at Schwitter’s, and Carlotta staring westward over rolling seas; with Christine taking up her burden and Grace laying hers down; with Joe’s tragic young eyes growing quiet with the peace of the tropics.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” she reads. “I shall not want.”…“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

Sidney, on her knees in the little parlor, repeats the words with the others. K. has gone from the Street, and before long she will join him. With the vision of his steady eyes before her, she adds her own prayer to the others—that the touch of his arms about her may not make her forget the vow she has taken, of charity and its sister, service, of a cup of water to the thirsty, of open arms to a tired child.

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