Title: Green Light (1935)
Author: Lloyd C. Douglas
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Language:  English
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GREEN LIGHT

by

Lloyd C. Douglas

1935

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

WITH ESTEEM AND AFFECTION TO

A. O. DAWSON

OF MONTREAL

Contents

Chapter One

Uncommonly sensitive to her owner's moods--for he had imputed personality to her--Dr. Paige's rakish blue coupé noted at a glance that this was one of those eventful mornings when she would be expected to steer her own course to Parkway Hospital.

The signs of Dr. Paige's preoccupation were unmistakable. Sylvia, who usually plunged through the street door of the Hermitage Apartments wagging her tawny tail from a hinge located in the lumbar region, was following her broad-shouldered master with an air of gravity absurdly appropriate to the serious concern of his flexed jaw and faraway eyes. Pete, the garage-boy, instead of loitering to tell the young surgeon what kind of day it was, had ambled off without venturing the customary amenities valued at a quarter.

Assured that her entire family was safely aboard, the coupé hummed a subdued monody on her twelve well-organized cylinders, and glided into action. Reckless of Sylvia's precarious dignity on the slippery rumble seat, she illegally swung herself around in the middle of the busy block, narrowly missing a ten-ton removal-van, and earning an impolite salutation from the burly driver of a gasoline tank. Dusting apprehensive fenders for a half-mile on Elm, she nonchalantly scraped the whole arc of the right kerb at the corner of Euclid, made pretence of colour-blindness at One Hundred and Eighty-Sixth, where she knew the cop, grazed a hub-cap at the narrow entrance gate, forced an empty ambulance into the dogwood bushes as she scudded round the big stone building, and demobilized a small convention of smoke-stealing orderlies in the parking-ground at the rear.

Pleased with her undamaged arrival, she belatedly made a great show of professional poise, by rolling to a discreet stop on the crunching gravel between Dr. Armstrong's sand-coloured sedan and the five-year-old roadster of Dr. Lane, who at that moment was noisily tuning up for departure.

Sighting the smart car sliding into the stall beside him, the grey-haired anæsthetist turned off his cyclone and nodded a greeting without enthusiasm.

"Where to?" queried Paige. "We're doing that tuberculous kidney at nine."

"Not till to-morrow," explained Lane discontentedly. "What's the trouble?"

"Oh--Endicott has been detained somehow. Just now 'phoned from Harrisburg or some place. Business conference or something. Back in the morning, or some time. I wish he had given orders for you to go ahead with it."

Paige, still at the wheel, absently lifted an expressive hand, and with a single flick of the fingers acknowledged the compliment and dismissed the suggestion.

"The lady is Dr. Endicott's patient, Lane. Came here especially to have him--and quite properly, too," he added meaningly, almost militantly, after a frosty pause.

"Of course!" agreed Lane, too fervently to be convincing. "I said I wished you were doing this Dexter excision because I dislike these postponements. They're too hard on the patient's morale. Once you've got a case all nerved up for an operation, it's--"

The banal platitude perished of its own stupidity under the unfocused steel-blue stare. Paige wasn't hearing a word; just sitting there glowering at a distant ghost. What was eating him? Lane guessed--and thought he knew.

Silently curious and more than a little perturbed, he watched the athletic young fellow's abstracted movements as he locked the gears, stepped out of his car, chained the whimpering setter to the steering-wheel, and mechanically moved away without another word or a backward glance. It wasn't like Newell Paige to do that.

With narrowed eyes he broodingly followed the tall figure towards the rear entrance, a bit hurt but not offended. He liked young Paige, often wondering why; for, as a passionate social radical, Lane was naturally contemptuous of the well-to-do.

He chuckled a little. Dr. Benjamin Montgomery Booth--specialist in radium, with a degree from Edinburgh, one of Paige's most intimate friends--had just been curtly disposed of with the briefest of nods as they encountered each other in the doorway. Bennie Booth's open-mouthed expression of bewilderment was amusing. Paige was playing no favourites; he evidently had something important on his mind.

Lane's grin changed to a reflective scowl. Drawing a tiny red book from his ticket-pocket, he moistened his thumb and extracted a thin leaf; brought up a small hard package of cheap tobacco, opened it, tilted it, peppered the leaf expertly, tugged the package shut with two fingers and his teeth, rolled a cigarette, ran his tongue along the margin, struck a match, inhaled deeply, all the while reminiscently spinning the reel of Paige's singular relationship to the celebrated Endicott.

It was a dramatic story, the first spectacular episode of which had been witnessed by a very small audience. Lane, himself, knew it only from hearsay, for he had been a mere stripling at the tail of a muddy ambulance in France when Jim Paige died, here at Parkway, of a swift pneumonia, following the malignant flu that had mown a broad swath through the hospitals after the manner of a medieval pestilence.

His old friend Sandy McIntyre, long since a lung specialist in Phoenix, had once recited that initial chapter for Lane in a dusty day-coach on the Santa Fe inexpensively en route from Chicago to the Coast.

"I understand Jim's boy is working now at Parkway," McIntyre had remarked in the course of their shop-talk. "Does he still take such good care of his hands?"

"Hadn't noticed," Lane remembered having replied. "Why?"

McIntyre had grinned broadly.

"They used to say that when the kid was thirteen or so he would sit on the fence and watch the rest of 'em play ball. Willing to play tennis, sail a boat, ride a horse, dive from high places, and almost anything else requiring speed, skill, and courage, but he wouldn't play baseball for fear of damaging his fingers. Said he was going to be a surgeon. Took up the violin, not because he wanted to be a musician, but to improve the dexterity of his left hand. They tell me that chap could walk right on to a stage and play the fiddle along with the best of 'em if he wanted to. Newell's a chip off the old block. You should have known Jim."

Sandy had followed with a dreamily reflective monologue. He had been Jim's classmate through their medical training. Knew all about him. He had also known the incomparable Sally Newell.

"As a student," McIntyre had recounted meditatively, "I used to think that Jim was the luckiest chap of my acquaintance. Boy!--he had everything! Plenty of money, and mighty generous with it, too. Handsome as a Greek god. Brilliant student. Born surgeon, if there ever was one. Not quite so audacious as Endicott, who was seven years his senior and already making a name for himself, but in a fair way to be as competent when he had had the experience.

"Never knew anybody as serious as he was about his profession," McIntyre had rumbled on, half to himself. "They ragged him about it a good deal when we were in school. You remember, Lane, the sort of fooling that goes on among cocky young medicals, as if the whole business was full of hanky-panky. Can't blame 'em much; just sensitive, scared youngsters, trying to build up some kind of defence-apparatus against the screams and shocking sights and stupefying stinks of a big hospital. But Jim hated their kidding about it.

"I recall one cruelly hot afternoon when Brute Spangler--best diagnostician we ever had, but hard-boiled as the handles o' hell--was leading a flock of us through the open ward of the women's surgical, he growled at Jim, out of the corner of his mouth, 'Cheer up, Father Paige. We're not doing the stations of the cross.' Jim's heavy black brows drew together into one straight line, and looking down into Spangler's beady little eyes, he said, without a smile, 'No--we're not, unfortunately. Perhaps that's what ails us!'

"And then--there was Sally Newell--"

There had been a long pause at this point in McIntyre's memories. They had made a tedious job of reloading their pipes to account for the delay.

"Paige's wife?" Lane had queried at length, knowing the answer.

"It was an ideal match," declared McIntyre. "Most beautiful girl I ever saw. You may be sure it hadn't required old Oliver Newell's money to make her the exact centre of interest wherever she went."

Lane, who had taken more than a merely inquisitive interest in psychoanalysis, would have liked to ask a few pertinent questions at this point, but had hesitated, knowing that the lean Scot with the prominent pink cheek-bones would have closed up like a clam. McIntyre didn't need anybody to inform him--even by tactful indirection--that the heart is located close to the lungs. There was another long wait while McIntyre fondled the things he had laid away in lavender.

"Nothing in my professional experience," he continued moodily, "ever stirred me more deeply than the wan and weary little face of their boy on the afternoon of Jim's death. Sally had gone out the same way two days before. God--how helpless we were!

"Naturally, we couldn't let the child into his father's room, for the stuff was deadly. His grandmother, Mrs. Newell, waited in the sun-parlour at the end of the hall. The elder Paiges were still on their way in from California. This boy haunted the corridor for hours, his dry, bloodshot eyes fastened on the door. Every time anyone came out, there he was, eager for news and wanting to come in. I'm afraid we weren't very attentive to his questions or his grief. We had all been too worn down to be considerate.

"That was the only time I ever saw Bruce Endicott stampeded. I always maintained he was the greatest surgeon I ever knew, and I don't expect to have any occasion to change my mind about that. Never met anybody with such complete mastery over a situation. . . . Well--I drew the sheet up over Jim's cracked lips and swollen cheeks, and followed Endicott out into the hall. There was this boy--Newell. I told the nurse to go and tell Jim's mother-in-law. Endicott took the lad by the hand and we went back to the library. It was unoccupied. Nobody was patronizing the library much during that frantic period.

"'Well, sonny,' began Endicott, closing the door, 'we did everything we knew.'

"The boy swallowed hard, a couple of times, and asked, 'Is my daddy--'

"'Yes,' growled Endicott, as if he were reporting some monstrous injustice, 'he is; but--' he repeated lamely, 'we did everything we knew.'

"I fully expected to see the gallant little fellow cave in, for he was nervously exhausted from worry and loss of sleep. But he had a lot of strong stuff packed away that we didn't know about. He stood there tense, his fists clenched until his thin knuckles showed white, his babyish mouth twisted into a hard knot, looking as if he had just been struck a blow in the face. And then, to our amazement, he piped out in a shrill treble, 'Now I'll have to be a doctor!'

"Endicott took a turn or two, up and down the room, muttering, 'Doctor! . . . My God! . . . He wants to be a doctor!' Then he stood for a long time at the window, looking out. After a while, he came back, reached out his hand to the boy as he might have done had they been contemporaries, and controlling a shaky voice, he said, 'Very good, sir. And if I may be of any service to you, I am yours to command.'"

In white duck, Newell Paige emerged from the dressing-room on the top floor, where he found Francis Ogilvie. It was not a surprise. He was always meeting her.

By agreement, arrived at many months earlier, they waived the conventional greetings and restricted their talk to necessary business.

"Dr. Endicott is not to be here to-day," she said crisply.

"I know," Paige replied. "I met Dr. Lane outside. Has Mrs. Dexter been told of the postponement? We were to have had her first."

Miss Ogilvie's cryptic smile was unpleasant.

"I believe not," she said. "The others have been notified, but"--the carefully pencilled brows arched slightly--"I thought you might wish to talk to Mrs. Dexter yourself." There was an inquiring pause which Dr. Paige might make use of, if he desired, for purpose of explanations, denials, or just plain stammering, but he allowed the opportunity to pass. "I understand Mrs. Dexter has become very fond of you," finished Miss Ogilvie.

"Thanks." Paige pushed the button for the elevator.

A bit of a problem--this competent, bronze-haired, physically opulent, chief surgical nurse. Once a warm comradeship between them had been in the making, but they had spoiled it for each other beyond any hope of mending.

One stormy afternoon in March, quite exasperated over Paige's wilful inattentiveness to her rather obvious and slightly disconcerting overtures, she had impetuously tossed herself at him, with awkward results. He had been sitting alone in the laboratory for a half-hour, studying an X-ray thoracic which wasn't any too generous with its disclosures. For some minutes she had stood at his elbow looking over his shoulder, before he became aware that she had no errand in the room. Her arm touched his lightly.

"Hello," he drawled, preoccupied. "What's the good news with you, Miss Ogilvie?"

She did not respond to the casual inanity as he had expected, and a meaningful silence had ensued, of such duration that he had put the plate down on the table and turned his head in her direction, looking squarely and at very close range into a pair of questing blue-green eyes. Had the cloudy pleura been as easy to read, Paige need not have been detained in the laboratory for another moment. The girl's full lips were parted, and there was an entreating little smile on her face, so near to his that the freckles, left over from last summer, were clearly defined on her white cheeks.

"I'm lonesome as the devil--if you really want to know," she confided, in a low tone of intimacy, adding presently, "and my name is Frances--I hate 'Miss Ogilvie.'"

Paige hooked the rung of a neighbouring stool with his toe and dragged it nearer. "Sit down, won't you?"

She complied with some reluctance, her half-impatient gesture and audible sigh implying a wish that she were well out of this unhappy situation.

"I like that name," said Paige companionably. "If the hospital regulations encouraged us to have Christian names, it would be easy to call you by yours."

Her face brightened a little and she murmured, "I could say yours, I think."

"For it fits you--exactly," continued Paige hastily. "I don't know very many people who have as good a right to it--Saint Francis, you know," he explained, when it had become apparent she was not following him.

The shapely lips were a little derisive as she replied, "Rubbish! I have no ambition to be a saint. I'm all fed up with everything; silly rules, stuffy discipline, pompous doctors, jealous nurses, and earnest social welfarers. . . . Tell me something, won't you? Why do you dislike me so? I've got to know!"

"But I don't!" protested Paige sincerely. "Quite to the contrary. I never knew an operating nurse with a more authentic talent for surgery. If I haven't told you so, it's only because I don't bubble over."

"Just once--you did," she muttered, with averted eyes. "Remember the day we did the little Morton boy's osteo sarcoma?"

Paige winced at the recollection. "My word!--that was a tough experience."

"I kept up with you pretty well, you seemed to think, with the forceps and ties. And when it was done, you said--oh, no matter. You've probably forgotten."

"I hope it was something pleasant."

"It sounds awfully silly, but it meant a great deal to me. You looked me straight in the face, for the first and last time, and said, 'You're a good egg!' I had never thought much about being an egg before." They both laughed, nervously, and Paige, vastly in need of a little occupational therapy, sharpened a pencil.

"Yes," he said reminiscently, "that was the worst one I ever saw. The little fellow didn't have one chance in a thousand, did he?"

She sighed, rose, and moved slowly toward the door, hesitating there for a moment.

"Perhaps it would be better all around if I left Parkway, Dr. Paige," she hazarded.

"I don't see the necessity of that." He had risen and stood facing her. "You are needed here," he continued, in a tone of challenge. "My God, woman, aren't you big enough to understand that our profession is more important than our personal desires, and gets the right of way over everything--over everything, I tell you! Stay--and play the game!"

She studied the floor, tugging at her lip with agitated fingers.

"You saw my cards," she said morosely. "It isn't fair."

"Nonsense!" scoffed Paige. "I wasn't looking. I don't even know what suit was trump. . . . Look here--you've been working too hard, and the whole business has got on your nerves. I'll tell Dr. Endicott you need a week in the country."

"Thanks," she said listlessly. "There's no need of that. And--I'll stay--if you're sure you want me to."

Paige smiled his satisfaction. "You're a credit to the hospital," he declared warmly. "It's the proper spirit. I knew you had it."

"And may I still be--an egg?" she queried, with a brave attempt to be playful.

"An uncommonly good one!" He offered her his hand.

When she got to her room that night, Frances Ogilvie found three dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses bearing Paige's card. It was a mistake, as he discovered next day. If, he reflected afterward, he had wanted to send her some token of his regard for her excellent sportsmanship in a trying position, he should have given her a new clinical thermometer in a gold case, or The Life of Osier, or a dated, candled, de luxe egg. Miss Ogilvie was, as Paige had conceded, an exceptionally able operating nurse, but--long before that--she was a woman. She would make a courageous effort to play the game, but she couldn't abandon her belief that hearts were trumps. So the roses, which had been intended to symbolize their friendship on a safer footing, had not cleared the air at all. Newell Paige came to dread the necessity for working in the laboratory, where he was almost sure to be brought to bay. Keenly interested in bacteriology, he had enjoyed nothing better than microscopical research, but no sooner would he be lost in his scientific problem than Frances would saunter in to bend over his shoulder, ruthlessly reckless as she pressed closely against him. He was for ever bumping into her in the corridors. She was at his heels until the whole place buzzed merrily. At length he had been obliged to be almost surly with her, to shut off the insufferable smiles and winks.

"Very well," she agreed tartly. "Strictly business, then, from now on. You wouldn't know how to be kind, anyhow--except possibly to your dog."

Confused and defenceless, Paige had replied, absurdly, "Well--Sylvia is a good dog."

Mrs. Lawrence Dexter's day nurse, Bunny Mather, obediently but unrewardedly studied Dr. Paige's face as he entered the room.

Bunny had been given a difficult assignment. It had been suggested to her that she should try to discover the nature of Dr. Paige's peculiar interest in her wealthy and prominent patient. She had so much wanted to please Miss Ogilvie, whom she admired to the extent of attempted imitation. Miss Ogilvie's fleeting smile, executed with half-closed eyes and a whimsical little pout, had cost Bunny several long sessions of private smirkings before her diminutive mirror in the nurses' home.

Unfortunately there had been almost nothing to report so far. Dr. Paige had been visiting Mrs. Dexter at least twice daily ever since her arrival for observation two weeks ago. She was not his patient. Dr. Endicott had brought him in, that first day, to present him.

"I want you to become acquainted with my associate, Dr. Newell Paige, Mrs. Dexter," he had said breezily. "You two should know each other. It is no secret, Mrs. Dexter," he had added, "that Dr. Paige is in the running to be the chief of staff here when the old fellow retires to the Lido or Waikiki Beach."

The acquaintance ripened quickly into an unusual comradeship. Sometimes Dr. Paige stayed with Mrs. Dexter for an hour or more. As her disability was neither painful nor fatiguing, there was no reason why she should not receive callers if she desired. No one of her family was in town. Her husband, an investment broker in a huge Mid-Western city, would come if an operation were decided on. A daughter, Grace, at home with her father, would accompany him. There was another daughter, Phyllis, in Europe for the summer with a party of Vassar classmates. The trip was Phyllis's Commencement gift.

So little had Bunny learned about her interesting patient who, contrary to custom, had been disinclined to discuss her private affairs with her nurse. As for the sudden friendship which had developed between her and the young surgeon, Bunny was regretfully unable to enlighten Miss Ogilvie. No--she hadn't the faintest idea what they talked about, for she was always promptly excused from attendance while these conversations were in progress.

"I mean," she had explained, under heavy pressure, "they never have said anything while I was in the room--not anything that really meant anything, if you know what I mean. They have both travelled; maybe they talk about that. Once I heard her saying something about a ship."

"One they had sailed on?" pursued Miss Ogilvie, alert. "Perhaps they knew each other before. Maybe she came here for that reason."

"I don't think so. She quoted something that a dean had said to her about a ship."

"Dean of a college?"

"I don't know. She was talking in a very low tone. I couldn't hear very well."

"Did Dr. Paige make any reply?"

"Yes--he said he didn't believe it."

"And then they laughed, I suppose."

"No."

"It wasn't just a little joke, then?"

"No--they were pretty serious."

"But--how do they look at each other?" Miss Ogilvie had persisted, after a thoughtful interval. "You know what I mean--as if they had something between them?"

"M-maybe," Bunny had ventured uncertainly. "I'll try to notice from now on, Miss Ogilvie--honest I will--but"--she added, truthfully--"I don't think I'm going to be very good at it."

"Was she nettled," inquired Miss Ogilvie, unwilling to leave a stone unturned, "when Dr. Paige said he didn't believe whatever it was about the ship?"

"No," Bunny had replied. She patted Dr. Paige's hand, and said, "I hope it doesn't cost you too much."

"Well--in God's name--what on earth does that mean, Mather?"

"I'm sure I don't know, Miss Ogilvie. You asked me what I heard them say, and I've tried to tell you."

Anyone should have known at a glance that Bunny Mather was not fitted, by nature, for sleuthing. Life had not been very complicated for Bunny. She had no talent for dramatizing the small episodes which sporadically punctuated her routine. An inordinate appetite for candy, cream, and other fattening refreshments had earned her the cherubic rolypolyness of a Delia Robbia medallion. She was not built for the sinister task of crouching at keyholes. Her wide-open, slightly protuberant, birds-egg-blue eyes lent to her round face an expression of ineffable guilelessness. This ocular phenomenon was due to an incipient exophthalmic goitre, but the fact remained that Bunny was almost, if not quite, as naïve and artless as she looked.

To-day she was resolved to stay in the room with them until definitely and firmly invited to leave. No mere hint or inquiring glance in her direction would be sufficient to dislodge her. She had just learned that Mrs. Dexter's operation had been put off until to-morrow. After that, there might be a week or more when conversation would be impossible.

One thing seemed sure: it was not a flirtation. Mrs. Dexter was nearly old enough to have been Dr. Paige's mother. And she certainly wasn't the sort to initiate or encourage a gusty little romance for the sake of passing the time.

Dr. Paige always had the manner of a person coming in for advice on some important problem. He was very serious. He never entered with the capable condescension of the physician making his rounds, carolling, "And how do we find ourselves this morning?" Bunny had thought of saying to Miss Ogilvie that Dr. Paige acted as if he were going to school to Mrs. Dexter, but had decided against that because it sounded too silly. She didn't care to risk hearing Miss Ogilvie say, as she had once said to her in reply to a remark, "Don't be an ass, Mather!"

Bunny busied her fat fingers rearranging the books and bottles on the table, glancing up frequently to note Dr. Paige's expression and movements. He stood for some moments at the foot of the bed, toying with his platinum watch-chain. Then he slowly nodded his head, and smiled; not a greeting, but an affirmative.

Quickly shifting her search to Mrs. Dexter's face, Bunny tried to interpret it, but realized that she had arrived the fraction of a second too late. Mrs. Dexter's sensitive lips were parted as if she had just asked an inarticulate question with them--some single-word query that might have been expressed with the lips only. If so--they had a very good understanding between them, these two.

And that would be natural, reflected Bunny, for they were very much alike. They were thoroughbreds. You could always tell. People didn't get to be like that by personal effort or education. If you had it, it was because you were born with it, and nobody could take it from you. You had it whether you were rich or poor, sick or well, happy or wretched. All the money in the world couldn't buy even a cheap imitation of it. Bunny knew very well she didn't have it. She knew Miss Ogilvie didn't have it.

Mrs. Dexter had the eyes of a thoroughbred; steady greyish-blue eyes that never widened suddenly in surprise or alarm or curiosity; serene eyes that never gave her thoughts away. There was one little snow-white curl slightly to the left of the parting on the low forehead, definitely outlined from the environing burnished gold. The white lock was not a disfigurement but a distinction. One suspected that in Mrs. Dexter's youth her Titian hair had been of a brighter yellow. There were deep dimples in her cheeks. Her hands were long and slender, and she could say things with them. Dr. Paige had the same slow-moving eyes and the same speaking hands. He had taken one of Mrs. Dexter's expressive hands in both of his and had seated himself at her bedside. These people were somehow related, Bunny felt.

He said something to her in an undertone, and she replied, with a smile, "What does it matter?--to-day, to-morrow, the day after. Don't be troubled about this little delay. I shall not be fretting. No, no--it isn't a pose, I assure you. I am quite in earnest. It doesn't matter in the least and I'm content."

"You are a very fortunate woman," responded Dr. Paige. "Last night I was thinking over some of the things you had said, and it occurred to me that if somehow it could be reduced to simple terms and communicated, it would practically revolutionize the whole problem of human happiness. But I doubt whether it could ever be made elementary enough for the ordinary intellect. I admit it's too much for mine. I think I get spasmodic little tugs of it--and then it is gone. One would have to be something of a mystic, I presume."

"No." Mrs. Dexter's negative was accompanied by a slow shake of her head on the pillow. "No--it isn't a matter of mental capacity or even of temperament. The trouble is that the average individual leaves most of his tasks unfinished, his mental tasks in particular. The world is fairly crowded with truncated minds belonging to people who learned the scales up to three flats and two sharps. If the tune they are interested in happens to be written in any higher signature, they have either to transpose it into one of the keys they have learned or give it up. Most people try to get along with a vocabulary of about six hundred words. This enables them to understand what is going on in the kitchen, the shop, and on the street. Any idea that can't be translated into kitchen-lore or shop-lore or street-lore is dismissed."

"Did Dean Harcourt ever try to put this into print?"

"No--nor has he more than hinted at it in public addresses. He does it all by the case-method. People in trouble come to him and he tells them. It's really amazing what happens to them. Why--I've known instances--"

"You may run along now and have a bit of relaxation, Miss Mather," Mrs. Dexter interrupted herself to say, without detaching her eyes from Dr. Paige's face.

Bunny still lingered, tinkering with the magazines and vases, consumed with curiosity to hear what was coming next.

"That will be all for the present," said Dr. Paige, with finality. "We will ring when you are needed."

Bunny slowly and reluctantly walked to the door, opened it, and softly closed it behind her.

Chapter Two

By admonition and example Dr. Bruce Endicott--elsewhere genial and talkative--had discouraged all unnecessary conversation in his operating-theatres at Parkway Hospital. The sentiment he had built up against superfluous chatter on the part of his associates and assistants was not restricted to the period when surgery was actually in process. He did not like to be distracted even during the preparatory business of scrubbing-up. Nothing annoyed him more than some cold-bloodedly irrelevant remark, when an operation was impending, "as if one were making ready to bake a pie or patch a boot." Daily experience of working together in silence had so harmoniously integrated this particular group of five, that their respective rôles in the drama were adroitly enacted without need of prompting or conference.

On this eventful Wednesday the pantomime had been in progress for fifteen minutes, unattended by any noise but the padding of competent rubber-shod feet on the tiled floor, the muffled plunk of the sterilizing machines as they grudgingly disgorged their immaculate contents through belching billows of steam, the intermittent swirl and swish of water rushing into capacious porcelain basins, and the patter and rattle and clink and clank of variously sized, curiously shaped instruments, hot, clean, gleaming.

Gingerly and at arms' length Miss Ogilvie held up the surgical coat, and Dr. Paige stretched out his dripping arms toward it, instinctively aware that her eyes were inviting him as they always were in this thrice-a-day experience of a face-to-face contact which lacked only a little of an embrace. The Tweedy girl stood behind him, gowned and masked, waiting to tie the tapes down his back. Dr. Endicott was still vigorously polishing his nails. In a moment he, too, would be offering himself to Ogilvie for the same ministrations his associate had just received. By custom everybody was made ready before Endicott.

The anxious face of Lucy Reid, the chief's secretary, appeared in the crack of the corridor door. Miss Ogilvie glanced over her shoulder, visibly annoyed.

"Could Dr. Endicott answer the telephone?" inquired the girl nervously, aware that she was taking an unforgivable liberty.

"Certainly not!" snapped Miss Ogilvie, through her gauze. "You ought to know that much."

"I told them," explained Miss Reid defensively, "but they insisted it was very urgent, and said that Dr. Endicott would be at a serious disadvantage if the message was not delivered at once."

"Who was it?" boomed Endicott, without looking up.

"Riley, Brooks, and Bannister, Doctor. Shall I say you will call them up later?"

He released the faucet-pedal and stood for an instant, head tilted to one side, as if listening for a decision.

"They said it was of immediate importance?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well, I'll go. . . . Sorry, Dr. Paige. I shall not be long."

Abstractedly stroking the fingers of his gloves, Paige walked through the alcove, passed the operating-table, and entered the adjacent chamber. Mrs. Dexter, with the customary modicum of morphine to reduce her active interest in the occasion, spread out her hand apathetically and signed that she was too drowsy to offer it, to which he wordlessly replied, by holding up his own, that he would be unable to touch her, anyway.

Grace Dexter, whom he had met briefly an hour earlier, stood in the doorway at a discreet distance, a bit pale, but entirely self-possessed. Her patrician face had the general contour of her mother's. Had the black hair been straight she could have done an acceptable madonna. Her figure was slight but shapely, as the severely tailored suit, unrelieved by any touch of colour, testified. The brooding grey eyes hinted at a well-developed talent for introspection, an effect augmented by the slightly drooping, sensitive lips. Slim, meditative fingers caressed a silver crucifix depending from a heavy chain about her white throat. Dr. Paige smiled, and she answered the recognition.

"Did your father come up?" he asked.

"Yes--and just now went down again. To the telephone, I think. He will be back in a moment. Mother seems quite fit, don't you think?"

"Never better!" said Paige confidently. Then, leaning over Mrs. Dexter, he whispered something in her ear which she approved with a contented sigh and several reassuring little nods. She closed her eyes, and the slightly smiling lips relaxed.

"Do I know what that was about?" queried Grace, in the tone of one asking for a password. Paige nodded and retraced his steps into the operating-room, and through the alcove where the white-swathed little company waited.

Presently the door opened and the chief appeared, quite plainly upset about something. Paige watched him anxiously as he resumed his washing with nervous haste. His face was flushed and the muscles of his cheeks twitched. The silence was taut. Endicott seemed to sense it with defenceless irritation. Everybody in the room knew that he had been engaged in an emergency conversation with his brokers, and he knew that they all knew. They knew that he knew they knew. He plunged his arms into the surgical coat with such force that he tore it out of Ogilvie's grip and it fell to the floor. Tweedy came promptly with another. His exasperation was all but out of control. At length, in spite of his haste, he was ready. They filed into the operating-room and gathered about the table.

Lane's thin fingers trembled a little as he readjusted the mask more effectively over Mrs. Dexter's face. Endicott noticed it and frowned. He stared glassily straight ahead through the high, bright windows while they waited for the increasingly laboured respiration to signal the moment for action. One more shuddering inhalation would do it. Lane slowly looked up, pursed his lips slightly, and nodded.

A hand-made Swiss watch could have had no better understanding of itself than this close-knit company of five. Endicott signed his commands to Paige and Ogilvie, Ogilvie signed to the Tweedy and Larimer girls--all the orders given with dexterous gestures. Endicott was working faster than usual.

The hands of the surgeons opened and whatever they required was instantly thrust into them; the others hovering close, alert, lynx-eyed. . . . A scalpel for Endicott, the swift use of a sponge thrust into Paige's fingers by Tweedy, a pair of forceps for Paige, the deft swipe of a sponge by Larimer, more forceps for Paige furnished by Ogilvie, fresh sponges for Tweedy furnished by Larimer, more forceps for Paige; clip, clip, clip, forceps, forceps, forceps for Paige, more gauze for Tweedy, a clamp for Paige, long-handled scissors for Endicott--a tense pause, quiet and stiff as a tableau. Larimer stood ready with the threaded ligator. Ogilvie offered the handles of a secondary clamp. Endicott shook his head. That meant he couldn't use it because there was no room to apply it. There was a quick, barely audible sucking intake of breath by Ogilvie. Endicott frowned.

"I'll hold your clamp, Dr. Paige," he muttered huskily. "You make the tie, please."

Paige realized that the pedicle had been cut too short for safe ligation. He adjusted the ligature with difficulty and drew it as tightly as possible. Endicott slowly and with apparent reluctance relaxed the clamp and withdrew it. They waited. The chief breathed as if he had recently been running uphill. He had made two grave mistakes. In his nervous excitement he had neglected to dissect the pedicle--sheath of the renal artery--with sufficient care, and had severed it too short for a secure tie. . . . The pedicle slowly rejected the ligature.

"My fault!" gasped Paige, as the flood broke. "I should have drawn it tighter. My God!"

The hæmorrhage was instantly out of control. Sponges would have been equally serviceable at a crumbled dam. The increasing tempo of the splash of big drops falling from the table to the floor quickened to a brisk patter and accelerated to a steady stream.

The chief seemed suddenly to go to pieces--a shocking sight to those who had never seen him panic-driven. He panted for breath and his hands shook. Ogilvie thrust a huge bunch of gauze into the pouring wound. He shouted to her to remove it, and frantically groped in the depths of the geyser with his clamp, hoping to recapture the spouting pedicle by mere blind chance.

"A donor--immediately!" he commanded hoarsely. "Here, Paige," handing him the clamp, "see what you can do." The frenzied grappling continued.

"How's she holding up, Lane?" mumbled Endicott, half incoherently.

Lane shook his head and closed the valves. Miss Tweedy collapsed on the slippery floor in a dead faint. Larimer dragged her out of the way. Ogilvie sponged the sweat from Paige's white face. The hæmorrhage was subsiding now. It had almost stopped. There was no further energy driving it.

Endicott and Paige washed at adjoining basins without the exchange of a word or a look. The chief was still breathing with an asthmatic wheeze. Paige was so shaken that his tears ran unrestrained.

Two orderlies were mopping the floor. The body had been wheeled into a room across the hall. Tweedy, quite nauseated, slumped over a basin in the corner, supported by Larimer, who was swallowing hard and apparently on the verge of crumpling.

Paige made a quick task of his ablutions, dashed to the dressing-room, and changed to his street clothes. Nothing seemed to matter now but a prompt escape from this place at top speed. His hands shook so violently that he could hardly manage his buttons.

Frances Ogilvie was waiting for him when he came out into the corridor. He pretended not to notice her, and moved quickly to the elevator. She followed, clutching at his sleeve. "Wait!" she cried. "I know exactly what happened and I'm going to tell everybody the truth."

"You're going to mind your own business," retorted Paige, measuring his words, sternly. "It was my fault and I've admitted it. And that settles it. You are to stay out of it, and keep your mouth shut."

The sluggish elevator was in use, its remote rumble threatening a long delay. Unable to bear any more of the tempest that had reduced the Ogilvie girl to a tear-smeared sputter of protestations, Paige suddenly pushed her out of his path and started for the stairway. She pursued him, sobbing aloud. He lost her somewhere between the third and second floors, and ran on. The last he heard of her was an hysterical scream, "You'll be sorry!"

In the main hall, the superintendent, Watts, called to him, but he did not stop. At the front door he ran into Ted Rayburn, the house physician. He had been closer to Rayburn, for a couple of years, than to any of the others, with the possible exception of Bennie Booth.

"Where are you bolting to?" demanded Rayburn, holding out both arms, semaphore fashion. "What's happened? You're white!"

"They'll tell you--in there," Paige replied, over his shoulder, hurrying on.

Walking swiftly to the gate, he hailed a cruising taxi and ordered the driver to take him home. He did not reply when the elevator boy at the Hermitage inquired why he was not using his own car.

The apartment was cool and quiet. Inagaki was out, probably attending to his marketing.

Paige flung his hat on to the table in the small vestibule and walked through the living-room into his library. Although temperate almost to the point of abstinence, he maintained a cabinet of choice liquors for the use of his guests. He went directly to it, poured himself a stiff drink of cognac, and gulped it raw. Unaccustomed to such heroic potations, and having had nothing to eat--it was now twelve-thirty--since his light breakfast at seven, he felt the fiery stuff make his head swim.

Telephoning the garage, he instructed Pete to go out to the hospital for his car.

"No--nothing the matter with it. Drive it back to the garage and bring Sylvia here."

For a long time he stood at one of the front windows of his quite luxurious living-room, beating a tattoo on the sash with restless fingers. The thick traffic on the street below was a confused blur of noisy futility. Everything was carrying on down there as if no sudden world-destroying catastrophe had occurred. These people apparently hadn't heard yet that there was no reason for any further effort.

The tragic affair of the forenoon clamoured for appraisal, but it was all too painfully recent for a sensible survey. On the trip home in the taxicab the one blistering fact that mattered most was the wanton destruction of his idol. As they had stood there, side by side, almost touching elbows, scrubbing off the blood that had been so needlessly shed, he had momentarily expected the big, dynamic, generous-hearted fellow to turn to him and say, courageously: "I was to blame, Newell. We both know that. I shall clear you of any responsibility, you may be sure." And he had already composed the quick reply, "Better let the matter rest the way it is." But Endicott--damn him!--had buried his hairy arms and pallid face in the square porcelain tub, splashing and spluttering, without a single glance, much less a friendly word. Endicott had crashed, completely cracked up. All that noble talk in his sumptuous library of an evening about professional ethics, good sportsmanship, the inviolability of the Hippocratic (or was it the hypocritic?) oath, the devotion to duty that demanded precedence over any and all personal ambitions--bah!--and to hell with it!

Mentally inspecting him now, toppled from his pedestal, Paige realized that Endicott's moral disaster had not been entirely unpredictable. He had seen the big man slipping, slipping, day after day. Too much concern about money. Too much fretting about investments. Too many business conferences downtown. Too much travelling all night and rushing into operations in the morning, for which he had not prepared.

There had been that Baldwin girl, for instance, only last Thursday. Simplest possible appendectomy. Could have done it with his eyes shut. No occasion at all for a fifty-minute exploratory. Hadn't studied the plate, that was the trouble. Was making a speech that night before the P.T.A. on (God help us!) "The Changing Thought of the Public in Respect to Surgery." Probably was thinking about that when they showed him the picture of the little stenographer's insides. Or wondering, perhaps, whether steel and rails would be stronger to-day. No matter if the twenty-dollar-a-week office clerk was kept in bed ten days longer than necessary. That wouldn't discommode the chief.

No--Endicott had not crashed from some dizzy height. He had been sliding for a long time. Paige admitted to himself now that he had been afraid to see the chief operate on Mrs. Dexter. Old Lane had been afraid of it too. As much as said so. He regretted that he had been so surly and highhanded with Lane. Lane was an honest fellow, for all his fanatical rot about the soul-destroying effect of easy money. Maybe frowsy old Lane was right. One thing was sure--money hadn't improved Endicott. It had made him puffy, arrogant, bumptious. And now, in an emergency, he had turned out to be a coward and a cad.

Newell's hard-driven pulse pounded in his ears. Unwilling to torture himself any further with thoughts of the execrable Endicott, he went into the library and wrote a brief letter of resignation to Watts, splutteringly addressed an envelope, and rose unsteadily to take another drink of cognac. Briefly cleared, he resumed his stand at the window, and thought of Mrs. Dexter.

Subconsciously he had been dreading the moment when his memory would compel a review of her case. To his amazement, the thought of Mrs. Dexter calmed him somewhat. He had anticipated that the recollection of her tragedy would haunt him for life. Strangely enough, the painful sight of her on the operating-table, rapidly melting away, was driven into complete eclipse by the enduring vision of her in her room. Incomparably steady, she now seemed to stand apart from all the blundering pomposities and blustering incompetence and whimpering anxiety of his madly careering world--an indestructible symbol of self-possession.

Sometimes, seated at ease in her tranquil presence, he had found himself smiling indulgently as she talked of "the things that make for personal adequacy." Under ordinary circumstances he would, he knew, have distrusted the phrase. People who chattered glibly of "the-things-that-make-for" this and that were tiresome, and more often than not turned out to be mentally untidy.

But Mrs. Dexter's confident talk about "personal adequacy" was refreshing. He had enjoyed hearing it because it was so evident that she believed it. He had gone back to her, day after day, just to hear her say it. The very enunciation of the phrase had put her singularly mobile lips through all their pretty paces. And it was a nice theory to toy with, academically; about as practical as a house made of tissue-paper; very bright and attractive, so long as it doesn't rain.

He had teasingly said this to her--just about this way--and she had replied, smilingly unruffled, "But doesn't it look a little like rain--over my house? You don't think I shall go to pieces, do you?"

"No," he had declared, with sincere conviction, "you'll not go to pieces, whatever the weather, but that will not be because of your curious philosophy. It's not the philosophy that insures Mrs. Dexter: it's Mrs. Dexter that insures the philosophy. What difference does it make, after all, what one believes? If your ductless glands are functioning properly, and you're biologically built to be optimistic, your creed will sound attractive. Your Father, Son, and Holy Ghost will allure them. Or your Transmigration of Souls. Or your Iza-Nagi's Magic Wand. Or your Mystic Shrine of the Blue Flame. People with an undeveloped anterior lobe of the pituitary or an enlarged spleen will come with flowers for your altar, thinking it is the thing you believe that has made you enviably competent to survive the shocks and storms and live beautifully. . . . You might as well expect to get results by screwing a Rolls-Royce name-plate onto a wheelbarrow, and command it to get about under its own power."

He distinctly remembered her drawling reply, "Pouf!--You and your glands! You'd better turn your old hospital into a nice new garage."

It had been very stimulating to talk with Mrs. Dexter. There was nothing wormlike about her serenity. Nothing annoyed her, but she was abundantly able to take care of herself in an argument.

The first time she had hinted at her curious theory, a bit shyly, he had suspected it of being some sort of esoteric religion, and inwardly sighed. Such a charming personality she was, and now she was going to be just another of those boresome, cult-harried women, preparing to unload an incomprehensible mess of sweet and sticky twitter relayed from some soul-surgeon. (Tuesdays at eleven in the Gold Room of the Ritz; a dollar-fifty, or the entire course of twelve for ten, the deep-breathing book gratis to subscribers.)

But it was soon observable that Mrs. Dexter, far from being just a gullible neurasthenic, was as remote as he himself from any interest in metaphysical cream-puffs. Indeed, she was his superior in respect to their attitudes toward such fatuities. He was acutely irritated by them; caustically satirical about them. Once he had said to her: "All religions are opiatic. The old ones stick to straight chloroform. The new ones like a little rose-verbena in their ether, just so it makes them too drowsy to think. One method is good as another." Mrs. Dexter did not deride any of them. She gracefully dismissed them with outspread passionless hands. Sometimes she had shocked him beyond belief with her bland insistence upon what seemed like an uncompromising fatalism.

"It's an odd thing," he had said, one day. "You seem the most gentle of spirits, but this belief you hold is hard as tool-steel. You have the temperament of a mystic, but your philosophy would bite a hole in a battleship!"

Well--she would be an everlasting inspiration. Tomorrow or next day they would carry her out to some shady spot and leave her there to become one with the soil. That grisly aspect of human mortality was made strangely unrepellent as he remembered her self-confessed integration with "a planned universe" which, in her opinion, was every way sound and worthy.

The door-bell rang. He answered it mechanically. Pete silently handed him the end of the leash and departed unthanked. Sylvia licked his hand as he unfastened the snap from her collar. She followed him closely into the library, and when he slumped into a chair she sniffed his fingers with quivering nostrils and whined.

"Go lie down!" growled Paige savagely. Then he went to the bathroom and washed his hands, thoroughly, this time. Having finished, he disrobed completely and spent a long time under the shower. Donning a dressing-gown, he sought the liquor cabinet again, telling himself he must not take any more cognac. It should be something light. He was barely able to move about. He poured a copious drink of rye whisky. The telephone was ringing, but he did not answer it. With a whirling head, he staggered into his living-room and sprawled at full length on the sofa, and slept.

Shortly after four he woke. Inagaki stood near, regarding him with concern.

"Dr. Rayburn is on the 'phone, sir," said the diminutive Nipponese.

"Tell him I'm out," muttered Paige thickly. "Tell everybody I'm out."

"Yes, sir--I told him you were in, sir."

"Well, you go back and tell him you're a little liar!"

Presently Inagaki was on hand again. He had a tall glass in which ice tinkled. It had a welcome sound. Paige reached for it.

"Did you tell Dr. Rayburn what I said, Inagaki?"

"Yes, sir. He also say I am the little liar. He will come."

"I might have known it. . . . What is this stuff, Inagaki?"

"Limeade, sir."

"It's pretty flat. Put some gin in it."

Inagaki found him sound asleep when he returned, and did not molest him. Paige slept fitfully. The room was darker each time he was roused by the telephone bell and the voice of Inagaki reassuringly replying to solicitous inquirers. Once he heard him say, "No, Miss, Dr. Paige is at the hospital. . . . He is not? Then I do not know."

At length he was aware of talk close beside him. A painfully pungent whiff of ammonia stung him wide awake.

"Hurry that coffee along, Inagaki," Rayburn was saying, "and make it strong."

Raising himself on one elbow, Paige ran his long fingers through his tousled hair and regarded his guests with a feeble grin. "It's love of humanity brought 'em here," he intoned, with deep solemnity. "Spirit of service. Man can't even get quietly inebri--ineber--can't even get quietly drunk in his own house without stirring up a lot of excitement. Did you fellows bring the ambulance?"

Bennie Booth chuckled a little, but Rayburn drew down the corners of his mouth and scowled.

"If you were in the habit of getting quietly drunk in your own house, there would be no occasion to call out the troops." He settled an ice-bag firmly about Paige's temples. "Here, drink this!"

"Better mix yourselves something," suggested their host, his thick head clearing slightly as he sat up and sipped the scalding coffee, "if you don't like to see me drunk by myself."

Booth thought it wasn't a bad idea. No use to humiliate Newell unnecessarily. He would feel better if they had something. Assisted by Inagaki, whose bewilderment over his master's plight amused them even in the face of their own anxiety, they returned with ample glasses of Scotch and soda.

"We've got to see this thing through, Bennie," Rayburn had said, under his breath. "Newell isn't fit to be left alone. He might do himself some damage. We've had enough of that for one day."

Seating himself on the couch beside his dishevelled friend, Rayburn studied his glass, and remarked casually, "Well--tell us all about it, Newell. What happened? Or don't you want to talk about it yet?"

"Not yet--or ever!" mumbled Paige bitterly. "Inagaki, make me one of those."

"Mostly soda, Inagaki," added Bennie, over his shoulder.

"But I would like to know one thing," said Paige, when the whisky had lifted his fog a little, "how did the girl--and her father--bear up? I didn't see them afterward. Wasn't quite man enough to face 'em."

Booth and Rayburn exchanged glances, each waiting for the other to invent an acceptable lie. Then Bennie shook his head; but Rayburn, noting that Newell had caught them in the act of conference, plunged into the truth.

"It has been a kind of complicated affair," he began ponderously. "Of course you've been laid up and haven't seen the evening papers. There was a terrific crash in the stock market to-day. The whole town is shocked. This man Dexter appears to have been cleaned out, along with a half-million other well-to-do's. Lost his shirt. That, on top of this accident at the hospital--or this on top of that--was a little too much for him. So he pushed off, this afternoon, about five. Not a very neat job. Didn't know his anatomy in the cardiac zone. Lived for a couple of hours."

"Ted looked after him," interjected Booth, "unconscious all the while."

"He means Dexter was," Rayburn explained, hopeful of lifting Newell's dejection.

"Damned silly remark," growled Paige sullenly. "And what became of the girl? Is she dead, too?"

"Oh, no; we put her to bed, over at Parkway, and sprinkled a little poppy-dust over her worries," replied Rayburn, pleased to be making an encouraging report. "But she had herself pretty well in hand, considering everything she'd been through: father and mother both dead and the family stony-broke--all in the course of about eight hours. Took it with her chin up. Maybe she was just stunned. Didn't want to go to bed. We thought she'd better. We sent some telegrams for her including a cable to her sister; addressed it to the young woman who is with her sister in London."

"Dr. Endicott about?" inquired Paige thickly.

"Huh!" snorted Bennie. "That bird!" Instantly aware of the injudicious slip, he added promptly: "I dare say he was busy. He had had a hard day. They say he took an awful beating in the market collapse."

Newell shut off this criticism with the surly comment that he didn't care to hear any criticism of Dr. Endicott, denouncing Bennie for a drunken fool who ought to have his envy under better control. To clear the air of this slight disharmony, they made another highball. Inagaki offered his employer some advice while this was in progress and was sent scurrying off to bed.

At two, the host having quite definitely passed out, Rayburn and Booth repaired to the kitchen, where they scrambled half a dozen eggs, grilled some bacon, and crowned Inagaki's statuette of Buddha with an inverted gin-jigger. Heartened by their success in giving a jaunty air to so profound a matter, it occurred to them that Newell, on waking in the morning, might appreciate some little memento of their playful mood at the time of taking their departure. Composing his arms and legs, they placed a bunch of celery across his breast, and drawing up two small tables at his head and feet put a pair of candelabra on guard. Bennie was for lighting the candles, but Rayburn, slightly less drunk, vetoed this mad suggestion.

At four-thirty Paige woke, bewilderedly took stock of his position which under any less tragic circumstances would have been ridiculous, dizzily struggled to his feet and muttered, "Dead, eh? . . . Why not?"

Reviving himself with another glass of cognac, he wrote a brief, business-like letter to his valued friend, Eugene Corley, junior member of the firm of attorneys who had long since handled his affairs and his father's before him, confident that his secret would be kept and his instructions meticulously obeyed. He rather wished he might have an intimate talk with his bachelor crony, who, although fully ten years his senior, had always been delightfully congenial. A postcript was added to this effect.

He left the letter, sealed and stamped, on the library table, and dressed quickly in a rough suit of tweeds and well-worn walking shoes, the dog following about closely from room to room, sitting on her haunches directly before him while he laced his shoes, studying his face with a somewhat annoying solicitude.

"No--you can't go, Sylvia," he said gruffly, patting her on the head. "Not where I'm going. You're still alive. Try to make the most of it."

She followed him to the door, and when he opened it squeezed past him and bounded out into the hall. He tried to coax her back, but Sylvia took advantage of his necessity to depart without raising the house. She made for the stairway, indifferent to her master's low-voiced cajolery and command.

It was still dark in the street and nobody in the vicinity was astir. There was a decided snap in the October breeze from the lake.

Paige turned south on Elm and walked briskly. Sylvia trotted at his heels.

Chapter Three

Miss Arlen and Phyllis saw them off on the Berengaria and took the noon char-à-banc back to London.

It was pleasant to think that they were to have six weeks of leisurely browsing about together after the seventy-two hot and helter-skelter days on the Continent. Phyllis, especially, had reasons for anticipating this experience with pleasant excitement.

Lined up along the rail on B-deck, as the last hawser splashed, the homeward-bound party looked into the upturned faces of Phyllis and Miss Arlen with undisguised envy--all but Patty Sumner, who was going home to be married on the sixteenth of October, and Miss Cogswell, who, in spite of her permission to arrive at Poughkeepsie a week later for the opening of the autumn term, was conspicuously restless to be back at her post. At least a normal amount of dispraise had been Miss Cogswell's portion during the twenty-five years of her professional career, but nobody had ever said she was not in earnest.

All things considered, the summer's excursion had been a success. Miss Cogswell, recognized historian and competent art critic, had remained an inflexible pedagogue throughout, marshalling her high-spirited wards with a solicitude that had proved irksome at times, but she had been an able director of the tour, providing handsomely for their comfort.

The managerial technique of Miss Cogswell was canny and irresistible. From the first day out, she had assumed that her young women (she never called them girls, though her discipline--the result of ten years' experience in a prep. school previous to her professorship in college--was better suited to the mood of fifteen than twenty-two) were in Europe on a serious errand, flatteringly imputing to them an ardent desire to devote every minute to the pursuit of culture.

Only one unfortunate episode had briefly interrupted their mutually forbearing display of concord. That had been at Milan. It was too fine a night to be put to bed at nine-thirty. They had just arrived at seven, from a week in Florence of such vast improvement to the mind that an hour of frivolous diversion seemed appropriate.

Miss Cogswell had been bathing her lame heels, when the sixth sense she had evolved through an earlier decade of listening and sniffing at tensely quiet dormitory doors warned her that the peace which rested over their suite in the Metropole was too complete to be real. Tugging on her shapeless dressing-gown, she had paddled about, peering into darkened and disordered rooms. Not a mother's daughter of her flock was to be found.

At eleven she and Miss Arlen located them, rosily merry, huddled close together about a round table in the exact centre of the Café Cova, stowing away tall parfaits. Before each culprit reposed an oily plate hinting at a recent antipasto, and an empty glass of the size and shape frequently used in the serving of cocktails. It was a humiliating moment, in which the tour-director's young women looked and felt like naughty little kindergarteners.

On the way back to the hotel, Miss Cogswell taciturnly leading on with stiffened spine, determined stride, straight lips, and stony eyes, Phyllis Dexter had lagged a little and fallen into step with Miss Arlen who was dispassionately defending their retreat. Phyllis admired her pretty English professor almost to the extent of adoration, and disliked the thought of having annoyed her. And sometimes she had felt genuinely sorry for her, too, because it was so manifest that she and Miss Cogswell--of necessity paired together--had very little in common.

"I'm awfully sorry and ashamed," admitted Phyllis, rather shyly.

"You may be sorrier an hour from now," replied Miss Arlen indifferently. "It was a shocking mess--sardines and ice cream."

Phyllis risked a smile, but suspecting that the time was hardly propitious for a light-hearted view of their misdemeanour, sobered instantly and said with contrition, "We were horrid--making you turn out when you were tired and sleepy."

"I wasn't sleepy," drawlingly dissented Miss Arlen, "and it is a lovely night. All the stars on duty."

"You're a darling!" breathed Phyllis, impetuously hugging Miss Arlen's shapely arm. And then, just as she was withdrawing her hand, abashed over the impulsive liberty she had taken--for Professor Patricia Arlen, Ph.D., was too coolly dignified and remote to be pawed over in this manner--to Phyllis's unbounded delight there was a warm pressure of response to her caress. It brought sudden tears to her eyes. She had distantly worshipped Miss Arlen, often wondering what it might be like to share the confidence of this enigmatic, exquisite woman. She thought she had discovered a little secret. Miss Arlen was human. On the inside, she was a regular fellow.

No attempt was made, next day, to improve upon the comradeship they had tentatively confessed. Miss Arlen was smilingly distant and impartial. But before the week was out, it had been arranged that if Phyllis could secure consent from home, she would remain for a few weeks in London with Miss Arlen, who had contrived a four months' leave to study in the British Museum. She had already won recognition with her two volumes of essays on the Victorian Poets, and now hoped to do another book on a subject she had not bothered to confide to anyone, The Droller Aspects of the Restoration.

They followed along the dock as the Berengaria was tugged out, waving good-byes, Phyllis wondering how soon they could decently call it a closed incident and seek the shade. Besides, she was pipingly impatient to have Miss Arlen all to herself. What would it be like to live in such intimate contact with Miss Arlen; to share the same room with her? Phyllis was on tiptoe with curiosity; just a little frightened, too. She must be restrained, mindful of her teacher's quite justifiable dignity.

At length Miss Arlen turned about, apparently satisfied that the ceremony of farewell had been adequately attended to, and they strolled over to the South Western Hotel where they were to board the char-à-banc. Presently they were bowling swiftly along High Street, revelling in the welcome shade. As they rattled under the old Bargate Arch, Miss Arlen tugged off her prim little hat with a girlish gesture of independence, as if the boundary of Miss Cogswell's jurisdiction had now been passed, and the significant smile she turned on Phyllis said, as plainly as if she had spoken it, "There! We are free now to do as we like!"

Phyllis, almost suffocated with pride and happiness over Miss Arlen's comradely informality, again warned herself against the temptation to ignore the considerable difference in their rank and years.

Absorbed in the quaintness of the villages and the ripened serenity of the countryside, they had but little to say to each other until they were within sight of Winchester. Phyllis was eager to talk.

"Are we going back to the Tate Gallery to-morrow?" she asked, remembering Miss Cogswell's parting recommendation, and feeling herself on safe ground here.

Miss Arlen tightened her pretty mouth, gave Phyllis a sidelong glance of mock dismay, and grinned! It was not a smile but a lazy grin! Miss Arlen closed one eye in a deliberate, diabolical wink!

"We are going out to Kew Gardens," she said firmly, "to lie flat on our backs in the grass and watch the clouds. And the first one who says the word 'art' has to buy the lunch."

Phyllis sighed happily.

"I'm so glad now--about that affair in Milan," she said reflectively. "If it hadn't happened, I might have gone home with the others. Then I should have missed all this--being with you, I mean. You were so understanding, that night."

"It didn't call for much understanding," drawled Miss Arlen. "I was sitting in the dark by my window and saw you go. Your dash for liberty was no surprise."

By the time they reached Basingstoke they were arriving at a least common denominator of mood and manner of talk. Phyllis was ecstatically loving London as they roared and sputtered into increasingly heavy traffic. Miss Arlen had forgotten her professorship.

They had their baggage taken to a little hotel in Bloomsbury, round the corner from the Museum. Phyllis had never stopped at a place so unpretentious; it had been Miss Arlen's suggestion. She had need to economize. Unpacking, they put on their prettiest gowns, Phyllis noting with shy admiration that Miss Arlen, so consistently conservative on the outside, was almost startlingly modern while in the act of hanging her travel togs in the closet. At that moment she didn't look at all like an authority on Tennyson. It had been agreed that they would go to the Trocadero for dinner, Phyllis begging the right to play hostess on this festive occasion. With the assurance of excellent experience she ordered with discrimination, finding Miss Arlen in full approval of her choices.

"I wonder if we shouldn't have a glass of sherry first?" suggested Phyllis, a bit uncertainly. "It has been a busy day; you're tired."

"Please," replied Miss Arlen. "But not because I'm tired. I never felt better in my life."

"It seems an awfully long time since you were my teacher," mused Phyllis, as they sipped their wine, smiling into each other's eyes, to which Miss Arlen responded, casually, "That occurred during one of our earlier incarnations. We will try to live it down."

After dinner they saw Bitter Sweet, and returned to Bloomsbury in a musty little cab at midnight--Miss Arlen rather pensive and quiet. Without much further talk they went to their beds, Phyllis instinctively sensing that Bitter Sweet hadn't been just the thing.

"Good-night, Phyllis, dear," called Miss Arlen, from the depth of her pillow.

"Good-night," responded Phyllis, her eyes misty, adding, in a reckless whisper, "Patricia." Her heart pounded as the silence piled up. She had made the very blunder she had been trying so valiantly to avoid, spoiling everything for them on the first day.

After five long hot minutes of acute misery, she murmured contritely, "Please forgive me, Miss Arlen. I hadn't the right to do that."

"They never called me Patricia," said Miss Arlen drowsily, "except when they disapproved of me. When they liked me it was always Pat."

"Would it be just terribly rude--and presumptuous?" asked Phyllis, her voice trembling a little.

"I think it would be very sweet of you, dear," replied Miss Arlen tenderly.

Phyllis drifted out, wishing her mother knew how supremely happy she was. She could see her mother's smile when, at home again, she would tell her all about it. And she distinctly heard Sally Welker saying, "You didn't call Miss Arlen 'Pat'--not to her face--not really!"

Had it occurred to either of them, through those enchanted days, to compute in terms of years their respective contributions to the diminishing of the distance which naturally lay between them, it would have been incorrect to think that they had settled upon a relationship midway in mood between twenty-two and thirty-five.

Miss Arlen had, indeed, recovered something of her youth, but to a more marked degree had Phyllis achieved maturity. The attractive girl had had her little problems, but they had been of cartilaginous structure. She had bruised easily and painfully, but repair was prompt and complete. She had never seen a compound fracture of lime-hardened bones. Not until now. Miss Arlen had not uncovered her scars with a morbid wish to shock, or a self-piteous bid for commiseration. With cool unconcern she had exposed her irreparable injuries, and Phyllis had grown almost to full stature at the sight. She had even ventured to offer a possible remedy.

The disclosure had come about naturally enough. They had been strolling through the Cathedral grounds at Salisbury on a brown-and-gold mid-October afternoon. Amused by antique epitaphs on the grass-ruffed, eroded stones, blandly certifying to the towering superiority of long-departed husbands as compared with the mousiness of their wives, the talk drifted from mere whimsical satire to a serious discussion of this indefensible relationship and the inevitable problems of matrimony.

"Funny you never married, Pat," remarked Phyllis. "I wonder how you escaped it."

"I'm not unwilling to tell you. It is quite a long story, though." Pat deliberated a suitable beginning. After a moment's reflection with averted eyes she said calmly, "He fell in love with my sister."

Phyllis winced and gave a quick little breath of pained surprise, but offered no comment, for it was to be quite a long story and she must not interrupt. She waited, with startled eyes.

"That's all," said Pat, in the same tone Phyllis had often heard her use when dismissing a class. "That's all--except that the invitations were out and the presents were coming in--and I found them in each other's arms when I came down to the library to show him my new travelling suit--and my favourite brother fought him and was hurt--and I ran away where they couldn't find me for ever so long--and they were married, and there are children I have never seen--and my mother lives with them--and all my people are in the same town--and I can't go home."

"Oh--my dear!" sympathized Phyllis. "How can you bear it?"

"I can't," replied Pat woodenly. "That's the trouble. The effort to bear it has frozen me."

"But you aren't, Pat!" Phyllis brightened hopefully. "I never felt so close to anyone, outside my own family."

Pat sighed, smiled wistfully, and nodded.

"I know, dear. I have been very selfish, warming myself at your bright fire. I'm surprised it hasn't chilled you. It really has been a Godsend to me--much more than you realize."

Phyllis murmured an inarticulate little protest and laid her hand on Pat's affectionately.

"I do wish you could talk with my mother," she said, searching the heavy eyes with loyal concern. "She has helped so many people. You'd be surprised."

Pat's involuntary shrug doubted it. For a silent moment she reproved herself for having bared her wounds, fearing that she was about to learn of some metaphysical patent-medicine--some echo of a psychological wizardry, perhaps, that would dismiss cold fact with an amiable grin and a careless, "There, there; you'll be all right now." She closed her eyes, tightened her lips, and shook her head decisively.

"Nothing would help me, Phyllis, but utter forgetfulness of it all. Your mother couldn't help me to that, however kindly she might try."

"But that's just it!" exulted Phyllis. "She does it! It's something our Dean taught her when my little brother was drowned. I was only a baby then, so my mother has always had it, ever since I can remember."

"Your Dean?" repeated Pat, mildly inquisitive.

"Dean Harcourt--of our Cathedral--at home."

"I'm not religious--not the least bit."

"Oh--but neither is he!"

"Don't be silly!" laughed Pat.

"I mean--this thing that I'm thinking about isn't religion; heaps bigger and more important than that. I'll try to tell you. But it won't be easy. You see--I've never been hurt. You have to be, I think, before it means very much. I guess it's a good deal like planting a tree. You have to dig the hole first."

"Perhaps I could qualify," said Pat dryly. "Let's have it."

For more than two hours they sat on the grey stone bench at the entrance to the cloister, the fallen leaves eddying about their feet, Pat slowly tracing meaningless patterns on the dusty flagging with the tip of her umbrella, Phyllis, falteringly at first but with mounting confidence, pointing to the mere mirage of an oasis she had had no occasion to seek personally. She was conscious, all the time, that she was making a very poor job of it; and when, at last, her vague ideas were exhausted, an extended silence meant nothing other than that Pat had remained unconvinced and unstirred.

"I think you get just a flash of it," pursued Phyllis, unwilling to surrender--"not the real essence of it, of course, but just a faint glimpse, among these old things we've been seeing lately. I've thought about it, a lot.

"Remember the other day when we were down at Saint Olave's, sitting there in the dusky gloom, looking up at the bust of Elizabeth Pepys? And you had just been talking about all she and Sam had been through; the London fire, the plague, the smash-up of two governments, the frights, the flights, the shocks, the sorrows; and there she was, so calm, so secure; and--outside in the street--you could hear it pouring in through the open doors--the dull mutter and rumble of traffic mumbling, 'On, on, on, on'--and you could hear the measured plop-plop of big shaggy hoofs on the cobble-stones, The same old loads were still moving. Same kind of straining horses, bracing their lathery shoulders against the same hot collars, lashed and yelled at by the same cloddish drivers; and Elizabeth, up there, not listening, but hearing; not gladly approving, but accepting. . . .

"So--what? Well--I'm afraid I don't know. I can't quite define it. Maybe it has no bearing at all on the thing I've been trying to talk about . . . I just know that for an instant, down at Saint Olave's, there came over me an almost stifling wave of--of comprehension. And I said to myself, 'If ever I get into trouble, I should like to be able to come to some place like this, where to-day's struggle and pain is being hammered down hard on top of yesterday's--and let mine be pounded into dust and silence, along with Elizabeth's.'"

She laid her warm hand, trembling a little with emotion, around Pat's slumped shoulders.

"Do you follow my mood, my dear? Or am I just talking nonsense? I mean--about the--the foreverness of the mumble-rumble, 'On, on, on, on!'. . . Three hundred years ago it was fragile, foolish, sensitive, little Elizabeth Pepys, all milled up in the traffic, swept along with it, bruised by it, afraid of it, allured by it, but in it and of it--and now it's Patricia Arlen and Phyllis Dexter.

"But the thing of it is that it's going on, and it has been going on, and it is going to keep on going on--as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be--and my troubles, in the face of it all, aren't really worth worrying about. . . . Do you see what I mean, Pat?"

"Phyllis, child," said Pat moodily, "it explains nothing, but it's a sedative. I think it helps--a little. . . . You mean"--she continued, gropingly--"you mean that we're all caught in the grip of something that's bigger and stronger than we are--something planned from the beginning--something inevitable--and we've simply got to keep coming along with it, whether we like it or not? . . . That's Fatalism--in case you don't know the exact name of it!"

Phyllis shook her head vigorously.

"Not at all, Pat. Fatalism is a treadmill. This movement I'm talking about is a procession. Fatalism says, 'I'm caught in the machinery of destiny and am being whirled around by it. I can't understand what it's all about, and I hereby give it up, and just let it grind me to bits.' That's Fatalism. . . . The thing I believe in admits the existence of the machinery, but sees it going forward instead of merely going round. And instead of asking you, as Fatalism does, to submit, this better theory invites you to understand! It says, 'Come along--but come with your eyes open!'"

"It's quite worth thinking about," conceded Pat.

"I wish my mother could tell you," said Phyllis wistfully. "It is so very beautiful, the way she explains it and lives it."

Phyllis had dashed over to a little shop on Southampton Row to load her camera. They were going out to the old Caledonian Market to-day. There had been a fog when they woke at seven, but it seemed to be clearing now. Doubtless by the time they had done the tube trip the sun would be shining. Phyllis hoped so, for three consecutive days of murky sky and chilly rains had kept them under roofs.

While she was gone, Pat received the cable. She sat down weakly, buried her face in her hands, and dizzily considered how with the least cruelty she might break the shocking news. Phyllis would be back at any moment, eyes alight, eager to be off for the day's excursion. The door swung open.

"Well--are we ready? It's going to be lovely in an hour or two; you'll see . . . What is it, dear? Don't you feel well?"

"Phyllis, would you mind very much if we didn't go out there to-day, I'm not quite in the mood for it. Maybe the fog has been dampening me. How about going down to Saint Olave's--to talk to Elizabeth? I believe I'd like to. We'll try out your little theory on me. Agreed?"

"Of course," consented Phyllis cheerfully, a little disturbed by Pat's sudden depression. "We can go to the Caledonian thing any time. . . . I think I would be glad to have another session with Elizabeth."

Most of the trip was done by buses and little was said on the way. Pat was so obviously in low spirits this morning that Phyllis decided on silence as her own best contribution to her friend's search for tranquillity. But she must try to do something for Pat to-day while they were at Saint Olave's. Perhaps she could make her understand what she herself had felt in that steadying environment.

It was only ten when they arrived, and they had the little church all to themselves. Walking slowly forward through the central aisle, they seated themselves in the right front pew where they could look up into the apse at the marble bust of Elizabeth. For ten minutes they sat together in silence.

Stirred by the sound of a suppressed sob and the sight of Pat's face wet with tears, Phyllis interlaced their fingers, and whispered, hopefully, "Can't you hear it, my dear?"

"That doesn't matter so much," said Pat thickly. "Just so you hear it."

"I do!" Phyllis's tone was confident. "It thrills me! 'On, on, on, on'--not just going round and round--but pressing on! Headed toward something that has to be worked out--not alone by Elizabeth, or you, or me--or on some particular day in 1669 or 1929--"

Pat suddenly clutched Phyllis's hand in both of hers, and whispered, brokenly: "Darling--I must tell you now. Something quite dreadful has happened . . . I wish it had happened to me, instead of you. One more tragedy wouldn't--"

Phyllis paled a little and her eyes widened, bewilderedly, as she searched Pat's distressed face. She swallowed convulsively and asked, with a nervous catch in her voice, "Pat!--what are you trying to tell me?"

With agitated hands Pat opened her handbag, took out the folded and refolded yellow message, tucked it into Phyllis's palm and closed her fingers upon it. Then she slipped to her knees on the worn and faded hassock, bowing her head over her tightly folded arms. . . .

The steady rumble of the ancient city, symbolic of the everlasting procession, throbbed dully in their ears.

Phyllis stared at Grace's cable. It was addressed to Pat.

FATHER AND MOTHER DIED THIS AFTERNOON ACCIDENT TELL PHYLLIS GENTLY

The message slowly slipped from her relaxed fingers and drifted to the floor.

Too stunned to concentrate, she was conscious only of a pang of such loneliness as she had never experienced. The harsh, strident racket of this foreign city assailed her, its rasp and rattle stinging her to full awareness that she was far from home. There wasn't a sound, in all this tumultuous, metallic, unconscionable din that could be associated with anything she had ever known or believed or cherished. Even the dejected shoulders of the woman kneeling there seemed strangely unfamiliar. She was alone.

Presently the tears came welling to her relief, great, scalding tears that freed the suffocating tightness of her throat a little. She blindly groped with her knees for a hassock and snuggled her trembling body close to Pat, who put an arm tenderly about her.

For a long time they knelt together, Phyllis utterly devastated with grief and sobbing heart-breakingly. The old verger's wife sympathetically brought a glass of water. Pat wanly smiled their gratitude, but did not allow Phyllis to be disturbed. The sobbing gradually subsided. Phyllis was very quiet now. Pat waited. The minutes dragged out into the third quarter struck from a neighbouring clock-tower.

Suddenly Phyllis stirred and stiffened to attention. Pat was ruthlessly snatched out of a painful reverie by the clutch of the girl's strong fingers on her arm.

"What is it, dear?" asked Pat.

"Listen!" whispered Phyllis, wide-eyed. "Pat!" she called, with an exultant little smile, "I can hear it!"

Chapter Four

It is presumable that among the more thoughtful of those who sought the counsel of Dean Harcourt, some were impressed by the fact that, although he was a unique personality, not too easily evaluable, his mind and mood were essentially the product of the Cathedral.

For more than three-quarters of a century, Trinity Cathedral had been one of the most highly respected institutions of the entire Middle West. This distinction may have been due partly to her imposing architecture, a stately Gothic strongly reminiscent of York Minster. It may have been accounted for also by her commanding location, for the Cathedral close was bounded by four spacious streets, one of them Lake Boulevard, the most prominent avenue in the city. Moreover, the great edifice faced beautiful Madison Park, to the considerable advantage of her massive towers and old-worldish buttresses.

But Trinity's influential position rested upon something more consequential than these fortunate external phenomena. There had grown up a general public sentiment to the effect that you always knew where to find her. She was not subject to the sudden chills and fevers which wobbled the erratic pulse of many another institution displaying similar symbols in the windows. Trinity had been singularly immune to widespread emotional epidemics. Sometimes neighbouring churches of clamorous importance were exasperated over her reluctance or downright refusal to participate in their tempestuous crusades of reform, and many an ardent front-paged apostle of despair had eloquently rated her for cold-blooded indifference to society's imminent collapse. A devastating crisis was on, shouted the gloomsters, and Trinity merely sat there and mumbled: "In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our prosperity, Good Lord, deliver us."

She had even kept her poise throughout the war, remaining discreetly neutral until the Government had officially declared itself otherwise, a difficult position which had drawn the fire of several prophets who were eager to be early on the field of battle and hotly impatient of these lackadaisical delays.

Then she had loyally advocated patriotic sacrifice, but without the prevalent hysteria, which had been interpreted by many as another proof of her habitual unconcern. One zealot preached a widely quoted sermon on the Laodiceans, who were neither hot nor cold, and pointed in the direction of the well-known Yorkish towers as a deplorable case of such apathy.

But Trinity did not allow herself to be disconcerted. When most of the other churches were hanging the Kaiser, Sunday after Sunday, she continued to intone, with a dispassionateness that infuriated the swashbucklers, "Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies." That was all you could expect, rasped the militants, of prayers that had to be read from a book! They had no capacity to arouse moral indignation!

When peace arrived and it was again prudent for Christian pacifism to put forth foliage and blossoms, Trinity's neighbours had given themselves to an orgy of increasingly bold resolutions that they would never, under any circumstance whatsoever, take up arms in an aggressive movement. Heartened by response to this endeavour, they took the next step fearlessly, declaring that they would never fight even in the defence of their country. Trinity did not go on record with convictions on this subject, and when heavily pressed for a declaration, announced that so far as she was concerned all such matters would have to be dealt with on their own merits when and if they called for a decision. The younger fry among the clergy pointed a disapproving finger toward her, asserting that Trinity was dead on her feet and didn't realize that she was stricken of a disease that would presently carry her off. But she continued to carry on as if quite unaware of the supposed lethal nature of the infirmity.

In the north-east tower a carillon of great value and wide repute played on week-days, from four to five, the historic hymns of the Anglican faith, and it was traditional that this daily programme always began and ended with O God Our Help in Ages Past, which seemed to be Trinity's theme song. On certain occasions of national grief or gratification, when the emotional tide ran high, these serenely confident measures may have stirred many people who ordinarily did not think much about their own spiritual reliances, and it is not inconceivable that some of the more discriminating, who had been bullied and badgered from one extreme opinion to another by institutions given to noisy tantrums of ecstasy or woe, were at least momentarily stabilized.

A high wrought-iron fence enveloped on three sides the Cathedral close. This gave the whole establishment an air of sequestration from the raucous hurly-burly of secular affairs, a redundant precaution, perhaps, for it was hardly necessary that Trinity should thus emphasize her insular aloofness from the contemporary fret.

At the back of the main edifice and facing on to Marlborough, were the Bishop's Mansion, the Parish House, and the residence of the Dean.

It was rumoured that there were telephones, typewriters, an adding machine, a few clerks, and the inevitable paraphernalia of business covertly tucked away in a remote corner of the Parish House, but the casual visitor who had occasion to call there was not assaulted at the front door by the metallic racket of modern machinery.

Latterly there had been a fad, originated by city churches and amusingly imitated by the less busy elsewhere, to give the impression that the operation of "The Kingdom" should be pursued by up-to-date techniques consonant with the methods of great factories engaged in the fabrication and distribution of commercial commodities. In such enterprising strongholds the prophet's desk was cluttered with telephones dangling from adjustable brackets. A row of buttons served his urgency in buzzing the various members of his staff into his presence to report on the success of last night's 'banquet' of the Carpenter's Apprentices, to present printer's proofs of the weekly bulletin and the newspaper advertising for Sunday, the programme for the Advance Club, and what had been ascertained about the leak in the roof. His stenographer sat with her pad on her knee, licking the point of her pencil, poised for action. The Millennium was about to be delivered, F.O.B., as per yours of the thirteenth which, if you have further occasion to advert to it in future negotiations, should be keyed MBX13579.

Trinity had never railed at this nonsense, considering it none of her business, but she had not gone in for it herself. The people who entered her quiet precincts were asked the nature of their errands by unflustered employees trained to understand that the less professional they were, the more ably they would discharge their duties.

George Harcourt was a product of Trinity Cathedral. Her mind and his were in complete accord. Perhaps they may have influenced one another somewhat during the twenty years of his deanship. His serenity had become so potent that persons of every conceivable type came to him for advice, consolation, and encouragement. It was a heavy load to carry, but he never complained of it.

Every week-day but Saturday a procession of men tarried in the reception-room of his residence, taking turns in conference with him, keeping him at his desk from ten to one. In the afternoon, from three to six, women of all ages and ranks appeared there for the same purpose. He never referred to it or thought of it as a 'clinic'. He compiled no statistics, posted no records, permitted no clerical fussiness in the handling of this strange business. An unassuming volunteer for the day welcomed the callers and seated them. In due time they would have their turn.

Every morning at eight two young curates placed strong hands under the Dean's elbows and led him--for he was a cripple--into the dimly lighted chancel of the Cathedral, where, whatever storms might be blowing outside, whatever tumultuous issues might be agitating the city or the nation or the world, his resonant voice intoned a petition "for all sorts and conditions of men; that Thou wouldst be pleased to make Thy ways known unto them."

When the early morning service was ended, the curates would assist the Dean to a chair placed for him in the centre of the chancel, facing the high altar, and leave him alone for a half-hour.

And thus it was that when broken people came to Dean Harcourt for reconditioning, most of them, it was said, went out of his presence with the feeling that they had been very close to Headquarters.

She entered the Dean's office-library and crossed it with the agile, elastic, assured stride of complete physical fitness under superb control, seated herself gracefully in the chair he indicated, directly facing him, laid an expensive handbag on the spacious mahogany desk which separated them, and loosened the collar of an exquisite Persian-lamb coat.

"Sonia Duquesne," she said, in response to his low-voiced query.

The interview did not proceed any further than that for a long moment.

Bearing most of his weight on the broad arms of his tall-backed churchly chair, the Dean leaned forward, pursed his lips thoughtfully, and took friendly stock of her. The rather hard, sophisticated smile she had brought along was gradually replaced by an almost entreating expression of self-defence, of meekness, of tenderness too, for it was now apparent to her that his deep-lined face bore unmistakable evidence of suffering.

They studied each other silently, with candid concern, Sonia so impressed and stilled by the spiritual majesty of the man that she accepted his scrutiny of her without the slightest sensation of self-consciousness.

It was a singularly interesting face. The upper lip was extraordinarily long, giving the firm but generous mouth an appearance of being securely locked. Perhaps, reflected Sonia, it was his mouth that encouraged strangers to confide in him. A friend had told her that people found it easy to tell him all about themselves without embarrassment or restraint. Doubtless it was the mouth that made them confident. It seemed to have been built especially for the safe keeping of secrets. And there was something uncannily prescient in his eyes. They were dark, almost cavernous. A veritable sunburst of crow's-feet at the outer corners gave the effect of a residual smile of compassion, which softened the penetrating search and interpreted it as a comradely quest. His thick white hair shone silver in the single light suspended above his head, a light that intensified, by strong shadows, the ruggedness of his face.

"That is your real name?" asked the Dean.

"Yes. I know it is a bit fantastic. But it is mine. My father's people were of French descent and my mother thought Sonia a pretty name. She saw it in a story."

"It is a pretty name, and I had not thought it incongruous, but you do not look foreign. When was it and where--that your mother read the story?"

"In 1901--Cedar Rapids."

"You are unmarried?"

"Yes," replied Sonia, her eyes occupied with the gloves which she had unbuttoned and was tugging off, finger by finger. Glancing up, she met his gaze, and added, "No--I was never married."

"Am I right in surmising that you are engaged in something theatrical?"

"Again I must answer--yes and no--"

The Dean acknowledged her honest candour with a slight inclination of the head. Sonia saw that she had said the right thing.

"I am the proprietor of a little shop, dealing in gowns. My clients--my customers prefer to think I am Parisian. I make no effort to counteract that belief. The place does have a foreign atmosphere. Perhaps I am theatrical--to the extent of playing a part in the course of my daily business."

"Do you attend the services of the Cathedral?" asked the Dean, still smiling a little over her frank confession.

"No, sir; I have no religion."

"Very well, then. Let us begin. Tell me all about it. What brought you here?--and remember that the more directly you come to it, the more time we will have to talk--profitably. What has he done to you?"

She sat for a while with a perplexed expression, her lips parted, slightly baring pretty teeth, tensely locked.

"No--I am not a mind-reader," explained the Dean gently, "but I have had much experience in listening."

"I believe that," said Sonia. "Well--he has decided to go back to his wife. She is not very well, and thinks she wants him. She has treated him very shabbily. It was her fault that he lost interest in their home. Now she begs him to return. I urged him to go. And I intend never to see him again. . . . That was yesterday." Sonia finished pulling off her gloves, and laid them on the desk beside the handbag with a little gesture of finality. Her hands were white and well cared for.

"So--I really did not come to you for advice," she continued. "For there is nothing to decide. They told me you were able to help people who had trouble. That's why I came. I'm glad I did . . . this is a very restful place. You will not scold me. I've had all the punishment I can take."

"You love him--I think."

"Devotedly! And he loves me. He needs me, too, for he has been very unfortunate recently--since the crash."

"Did he contribute to your support?"

"Never! It wasn't on that basis, at all. In fact, for the past few weeks--"

Dean Harcourt's lips tightened, and he slowly raised a hand.

"Don't you want me to tell you?" asked Sonia, wide-eyed, shaking her head girlishly.

"Not that. . . . I think you will feel better afterwards if you do not confide that part of it."

Sonia looked puzzled; then nodded approval.

"I take it that you bear his wife no ill-will?"

"Oh, no, not at all," she replied quickly. "In fact, lately, since he has been so hard-pressed, and I knew she was ill, I have--"

"Don't!" commanded the Dean, so sternly that she winced under his unexpected rebuke. "You mustn't tell that to anybody--not even to me!" His voice grew gentle. "And may I add that I consider you a very fortunate woman to be possessed of such a soul. . . . If you were my daughter I would be proud of you."

Her lips trembled as she replied, "Soul? I hardly knew I had one."

"Yes," sighed the Dean, running his long fingers through the shaggy hair at his temples. "Yes--that's the trouble. People collide with circumstances that push them off the commonly accepted moral reservation--and then they assume that they have lost their souls. . . . See here! Do you know anything about football?"

"A little. I often go. I did--last Saturday."

"Very good. You will have noticed then that a player sometimes runs out of bounds. Often it's his own fault, though frequently he is forced over the chalk-line. But, however it may have happened, he isn't sent home in disgrace. The game officials mark the spot where he went out, and carry the ball back into the field from that point."

"And then," said Sonia, "he loses his right to it."

"Only temporarily," corrected the Dean, pleased with this feature of his allegory. "He may quickly regain his right to pick up the ball. There is no telling but the next time he lays hands on it, he will go through for a touchdown."

"You don't think I've lost my soul, then?"

"I should be more disposed to think," declared the Dean warmly, "that you have just now come to the place in your life where the essential fineness of you is about to have its great chance."

"What would you have me do?" asked Sonia sincerely.

"You must find somebody or something to absorb your love--a child, perhaps, or a worthy charity in which you may invest yourself personally. Your case is not so difficult as you think. You came to grief through love. It is the people who get into trouble through hate--they're the ones I worry over. Sometimes it is very hard to help them. Love is a gift--abused, overlooked, misdirected, quite frequently--but a gift, nevertheless. Hate is a disease. And you, obviously, are not a hater.

"This encourages me to believe that you may be able to understand to what an extent the happiness of the world depends upon the clear vision of people who have a natural talent for love--to neutralize the bad influence of the people who are diseased by hate. Let me show you what I mean. . . ."

The Dean edged himself far forward in his chair, rested his elbows on the desk, and looked Sonia steadily in the eyes, urging her earnest concentration.

"You see--not many people take time to consider how they are related to the Long Parade. They snatch their little pleasures; they bemoan their little disappointments; they smile and smirk and sigh and sulk, reacting variously to events affecting them as individuals. But they do not think of themselves as component parts of an era. They fail to understand that we are all trudging along, elbow to elbow, in an endless, tightly integrated procession, in which our most important interests are held in common.

"Sometimes they sense it a little when some large catastrophe has frightened them into a huddle. It is often reported of groups that they have felt it keenly in time of shipwreck, battle, or some mass tragedy. Then they live, for an hour, in a previously unexperienced state of nobility, discovering themselves to be brave, and suddenly impressed by the fact that human beings are all related.

"People with an extraordinary talent for love should be able to understand this in the ordinary process of living, and get the same thrill out of uneventful daily life that the shipwrecked experience when tugged together by sudden misfortune.

"Now--this brings us up to your case--your love has been so urgent that it has led you to defy the social canons. You would like to atone for it, or at least try to justify your possession of a love so reckless. Very well--I say!--you can do it! You must do it! Try to begin your thinking about this by believing that the successful onward push of the human procession is the important thing, after all; far more important than any of the trifling ups and downs of the individuals. . . . Sometimes I like to think of civilization as a ship. That ship, my friend, is more important than any member of the crew! If you want to pay for the privilege of your love--and the mistakes of your love--believe that!"

They sat for a little while in silence. The Dean had made a platitude sound vital, dynamic. Sonia distinctly felt the strong tug of it. Her eyes were contemplative.

"That's all," said the Dean, rousing from the reverie into which he had momentarily drifted. "I shall be thinking of you. We will try to find something specific for you to do. Are you agreed?"

She rose to go, apparently reluctant to leave.

"I hope I can hold this feeling when I am outside again--in the street," she said meditatively. "There is something about this place--and you--that has made my worries seem very small. . . . Forgive my asking--if this isn't the thing to say--but shouldn't I pay somebody for this interview--pay it to the Cathedral, maybe?"

"Yes," replied the Dean, "I was just coming to that. You are to go through that door at the right. You will find a small dressing-room. Take off your hat and coat, and return to me."

She stood for a moment, mystified; then smiled, and obeyed. Presently she was back, waiting orders, her face full of inquiry.

"Now I want you to go out to the reception-room where you waited when you came here, and inquire who is next. You will take that woman, whoever she is, into the small adjacent room: you know the one I mean."

"Where your secretary took me," said Sonia. "Really--she was the sweetest person I ever met, Dean Harcourt. She was so tender--and understanding."

"I am glad you found her so. . . . Well--you take your lady into that little room and let her tell you all she wants to about her reasons for coming here, asking her the same general questions you were asked. And then you come back and tell me. After that, you may bring her to my door. Then you will be free to recover your belongings and go your way. There is another exit from the dressing-room, leading into the hall."

Sonia hesitated.

"But, Dean Harcourt"--she protested--"it seems such a pity to ask me to do this when I have had no experience--and there is your secretary, outside, who knows exactly what to say to people. I never met anyone so--so thoroughly fitted to deal with a person in trouble."

The Dean smiled enigmatically.

"That woman is not my secretary," he said quietly. "She was my last caller--just before you came."

Sonia's amazement parted her lips and narrowed her eyes.

"Do you always make them do that?" she asked.

"No--just the ones I think I can trust to do it well."

"I'll try," she said.

She was gone for about five minutes and returned with a distressed face. It was quite evident that she had been crying.

"Well?"

"Oh--Dean Harcourt--it's about her little girl. The doctors told her this morning that the little thing isn't ever going to be right, mentally; a brain tumour, or something. She's simply heart-broken. . . . And there wasn't a thing I could say that would have been of any comfort to her. . . . I just held her--and couldn't talk. I'm afraid you made a mistake in sending me out there."

"It was very well done, I think," said the Dean. "Now go and bring her in. And then you go round to the dressing-room and powder your nose--and run along. It has been a good day's work."

Sonia impulsively clasped his hand.

"I think you're wonderful!" she exclaimed, smiling pensively through her tears.

"No, Sonia," he replied, measuring his words slowly, "I'm not wonderful. . . . But you have made connexion with something, this afternoon, that is wonderful--wonderful!" Drawing himself out of the introspective mood in which he seemed to have been speaking more to himself than to her, he added: "When you leave the dressing-room, if you turn to the right the hallway will lead you directly into the nave of the Cathedral. . . . Go out that way. And when you are there, tarry a moment, sit down, face the altar, and say a little prayer for me. . . . I am not very strong, you know, and I need the co-operation of people like you."

The clock in the great bell-tower was striking four. Trinity's theme-song vibrated in the air.

Sonia sank to her knees beside the Dean's chair and murmured, brokenly, "People like me! . . . Oh, my God!"

He laid a firm hand on her quivering shoulder.

"Come," he said gently, "your friend is waiting."

She rose to her feet and walked unsteadily to the door, stood for a moment with her hand on the knob, wiping her eyes and striving valiantly to regain her self-control. Then she glanced back at the Dean, who sat with his elbows on the desk, his seamed face cupped in his hand, and a rapt expression in his eyes, listening to the bells.

Sonia smiled bravely, and turned the knob.

"I think I'll be all right now," she said.

"Yes--child," replied the Dean, as one answering from a dream, "you'll be--all right--now."

Chapter Five

"Something tells me, Dr. Norwood, that you came here to please our mutual friend Sinclair rather than in pursuit of a personal wish."

Dean Harcourt significantly tapped the typed note with his gold pince-nez and regarded his taciturn guest with an interrogatory smile.

Andrew Norwood, who with suppressed impatience had been dourly torturing a closely clipped, fair moustache, stole a quick glance from under his contracted brows, reluctantly met the Dean's inquiring eyes, recrossed the lengthy legs of a former all-American tackier, and drew his normally pleasant mouth into something half-way between a scowl and a grin.

"Sometimes," amplified the Dean, with the barest suggestion of a bantering twinkle, "a letter of introduction is a white elephant."

The interview was not taking off as Norwood had expected. This Dean Harcourt was anything but the benignly naïve old gentleman he had pictured. His infrequent glimpses of the distinguished churchman had been at a long range. He had seen him, a time or two, on the platform at large civic assemblies; had heard him read a formal prayer at a Commencement; had indifferently assumed him to be the typical stage-jeered clergyman, medieval, other-wordly, unctuous, and sweetly suave. Doubtless he would be so flattered by an unsolicited call from a university professor, bearing a letter from a prominent bank president, that his surprised delight would make him annoyingly agreeable. Norwood knew now that he had been mistaken, and felt himself at an absurd disadvantage in the presence of this man who had the eyes of a fluoroscope.

"It is quite true, sir," he confessed stiffly, "that I might not have asked for this conference but for the suggestion of Mr. Sinclair."

Dean Harcourt received this frankness with a cordial bow. Bombarded all day long with the emotional onslaughts of people who hurled their troubles at him through a drizzle of tears, it was refreshing to face this sullen but handsome fellow whose every gesture said that he hadn't wanted to come.

"Robert Sinclair," remarked the Dean casually, "is a trustee of Trinity Cathedral and a personal friend of mine. May I inquire how he is related to you?"

"He did not tell you?"

"No."

Norwood stroked his strong jaw moodily, and considered an explanation.

"I had hoped you might not ask me that," he said, at length, with a trace of asperity. "I had occasion yesterday to negotiate a modest loan. As a small depositor with no collateral, I was referred to Mr. Sinclair. In the course of our conversation, which involved an intimate account of my personal affairs from the cradle to the grave, he advised me to talk to you."

"And granted you the loan on that condition?"

"Well," admitted Norwood, flushing slightly, "he did not demand it, in so many words; but he made it quite clear that he expected me to comply."

Dean Harcourt adjusted his glasses and dipped his pen in the ink.

"Now that you have discharged this part of your obligation to Mr. Sinclair," he said dryly, "I shall sign my name to his letter and restore it to you so that you may be able to prove--"

"Oh, I say, sir," growled Norwood, hitching his chair a little closer to the big mahogany desk, "I haven't meant to be so testy and impolite. I have been in trouble. But it isn't the sort of thing I want to confide. If I did, I wouldn't go--off my own bat--to a member of your profession. Whatever feeling I have toward the church is antagonistic. My presence here is an impertinence. And--anyway--I dislike to air my private perplexities."

"I can understand that attitude." The Dean leaned back at ease in his tall chair, as if the business of their conference had been concluded. "Your disinclination to talk about your troubles puts me on your side, I think. You are fortunate in that you do not want to be pitied. In most cases, pity is ruinous. All one needs to say to many an unhappy person is, 'You poor thing!' and the victim immediately sets about it to demonstrate how poor a thing he is."

Norwood pulled a crooked smile which said that he was not going to be taken into camp easily.

"So--we don't have to discuss your affairs," continued Dean Harcourt. "I observe that you are a professor of modern history. Perhaps you would prefer to talk about that. Who, for instance, did more for England--Gladstone or Disraeli?"

"Yes--I am a professor of history," snapped Norwood, suddenly aflame. "My trouble is located at that spot," he went on impetuously. "I came to the university as an associate professor in 1923. Two years later I was given a full professorship. It was no secret in the faculty that when Professor Denton reached retirement age, I was expected to succeed him as head of the department. It was his wish. As you are undoubtedly aware, Dr. Denton, after many months of illness--during which time I assumed his duties--died in September. Our new president, Dr. Markham, has just announced that he is bringing in Ware of Oxford to take the position.

"This has been a serious disappointment to me, sir. For one thing, I have need of the increased salary; had already liberalized my budget in anticipation of it. But--far more importantly--this has been a blow to my career."

He paused, and for the first time looked Dean Harcourt squarely in the eyes with a man-to-man request for sympathetic understanding, meeting encouragement in the deep-lined face. Norwood was suddenly struck with the ineradicable marks of long-borne pain which furrowed the tense lips.

"Since the death of my wife," Norwood surprised himself by confiding, "there has been little to absorb my time and thought but my profession. That was four years ago. We were very good companions. I have a small child. I am trying to keep her with me. She is a comfort, of course, but the care of her limits my outside interests. My profession, therefore, constitutes my present life. I have thrown myself into it with complete abandonment of everything else. And now it appears that I have gone about as far in it as I am likely to go. At sixty I shall be exactly where I am--at thirty-eight."

"Do your students appear to have any opinions on this subject?" interjected Dean Harcourt.

"They do!" declared Norwood promptly. "I am told there was a well-attended indignation meeting, the night before last."

"Rather unfortunate," remarked the Dean. "However, you will be able to correct that before it has done any damage."

"Damage! What damage? Shouldn't they have the right to express themselves on this injustice?"

Dean Harcourt sat silently toying with a paper-knife, broodingly searching his visitor's troubled face. Presently his eyes drifted slowly to a beautiful etching on the southern wall, at his left--a superb reproduction of Holman Hunt's The Light of the World. Norwood's gaze, instinctively following along, rested briefly on the picture. He was annoyed. The Dean was staging a rebuke.

"Of course," he muttered, nodding his head toward the etching, "that is the ideal attitude to take--crown of thorns--meek submission--gentle tapping on the door that has been slammed in one's face. Not much of that on display at the university, I can assure you!--and it's supposedly a Christian institution. He may have been the light of the world; but, so far as I can see, organized Christianity has done more to keep the world in darkness than any other influence in human history! Even the Buddhists never burned a scientist at the stake!"

"They never had any to burn," said Dean Harcourt quietly. "But--be all that as it may, Dr. Norwood," he continued, waiving the irascible comments of his gloomy guest, "it seems to me that this apparent misfortune of yours is an important event in your career. You have now been offered--left-handedly, I admit--an unusual opportunity. Here are the facts in the case. You have been badly treated and the university knows it. A position to which you were entitled has been given to a stranger. Your students are loyally incensed. They will be prejudiced against the new man when he arrives. This will make it difficult for the history department to function properly.

"You, I take it, would be the last man to desire that unhappy state of things, for you are sincerely interested in the welfare of your department--so much so, indeed, that you should have been put in command of it. Why don't you call a meeting of your indignant students and request them to accept the situation exactly as it stands? The ship is more important than any member of the crew--including the captain and the first mate. When this Oxford professor turns up, be his friend."

Norwood, slightly mollified, was listening attentively now.

"You will discover," predicted the Dean, "that your faculty friends will be glad that an episode threatening disruption and bad feeling has been handled with diplomacy. And as for your students . . . man!--what a chance! If you are looking for a brilliant career as a teacher, step into it. It is ready and waiting for you. The average college youngster is much more interested in sportsmanship than scholarship. This disappointment of yours, if properly interpreted, is going to add importance to every word you say in your classroom.

"History must be rather difficult to teach, these days," pursued the Dean, soliloquizing. "So much of it has been shown to be merely nationalistic propaganda; monumental falsehoods, spread on a large canvas; unjustifiable mass martyrdoms demanded by the greed and egotism of selfish and pompous men. . . . And that's a pity, for there has been no influence so far-reaching and ennobling as these epics of gallant hazards. To preserve the essential values of that stirring saga, it must be interpreted to this new generation by men who, themselves, are morally equipped to recognize bravery when they see it. If this task of evaluating history is delegated to muck-rakers, idol-smashers, and grave-robbers, the moral losses will be incalculable, and a great deal of the damage will be irreparable. The oncoming crop of young men have had it explained to them that war is a racket. And perhaps it is just as well, for the sake of the world's peace, that this sentiment should be developed. But it should also be taught that courage is not a racket! And the man best qualified to point out that distinction is one who can talk about heroism with the authority of personal experience.

"You see, my friend," persisted Dean Harcourt earnestly, "we are at our best when serving as time-binders. Heaven help the era that scornfully repudiates its past! The normal human spirit has an instinctive talent for the building of monuments and a reverent regard for the sanctity of tombs. The average man, whether he realizes it or not, has been more directly guided into whatever nobility he possesses by the silent inspiration of the valiant dead than the clarion challenges of his own time. Would it not be a vast misfortune if, by the ruthless destruction of that guidance, we and those who come after us should be doomed to live in a world of pillaged sepulchres and desecrated shrines?

"Now it happens that the very large majority of all these inspiring memorabilia are reminiscent of wars. Most of the heroes who sit on iron horses in the public parks of all nations were celebrated soldiers; most of the marble busts of eminent statesmen in the world's cherished halls of fame perpetuate the glory of diplomatists who came by their distinction during periods of strife. . . . You historians are very properly teaching the potential leaders of the new day to despise and discountenance war. So be it. You are on the right track, I think. But the thing that worries me is the utter absence of a programme for the monuments to be erected now and henceforth. What kind of people are going to bestride the iron horses of the future? What symbols of valour do you suggest? Perhaps you will advocate the type of courage exemplified in personal sacrifice and self-renunciation for the sake of the general good. Do you think you could ever stir a youngster's pulse with that manner of appeal? Could you make the call of self-abandoning duty alluring enough to compete with the rattle of a drum? I firmly believe you could! But--to do it with any hope of success, you yourself would have to come into your lecture-hall armed with the credentials certifying that you had tried it!". . .

"I do see your point," agreed Norwood, "and I admit the soundness of your argument. But--even so--to have been completely thwarted in one's rightful expectation of professional advancement is a nasty dose to take. Perhaps"--he went on, feeling his way--"perhaps you do not realize just what that means, Dean Harcourt. You yourself have been a very successful man in your profession. You are well at the top of it. I dare say you never experienced what I am going through."

Dean Harcourt slowly raised his dark, cavernous eyes, and gave Norwood a long, searching look that made him wonder to what length of inexcusable impudence he had committed himself. It was so very plainly written on this man's face that he had suffered.

He waited, flushed with chagrin, for the Dean to defend himself against the charge that he had counselled a sacrifice of personal ambition without a first-hand knowledge of its cost. A whole minute passed. Dean Harcourt ventured no reply to the challenge; sat now with bowed head. It left Norwood defencelessly despising himself.

After a while the Dean glanced up from the reflective mood into which he had fallen, and smiled. It was exactly as if he were tolerantly ignoring the awkward, blustering arrogance of a ten-year-old boy. Norwood disliked to have the interview close on this diminished seventh chord, but it was now quite obvious that Dean Harcourt had no intention of ending it otherwise.

"I meant no of