reat confusion:

"Forgive me. I do trust you all. I know what you do is necessary. But
perhaps it will not be too late in two or three days...."

Two or three days! We will see to-morrow.

The nights are terribly hot; I suffer for his sake.

I come to see him in the evening for the last time, and encourage him to
sleep. But his eyes are wide open in the night and I feel that they are
anxiously fixed on mine.

Fever makes his voice tremble.

"How can I sleep with all the things I am thinking about?"

Then he adds faintly:

"Must you? Must you?"

The darkness gives me courage, and I nod my head: "Yes!"

As I finish his dressings, I speak from the depths of my heart:

"Leglise, we will put you to sleep to-morrow. We will make an
examination without letting you suffer, and we will do what is
necessary."

"I know quite well that you will take it off."

"We shall do what we must do."

I divine that the corners of his mouth are drawn down a little, and that
his lips are quivering. He thinks aloud:

"If only the other leg was all right!"

I have been thinking of that too, but I pretend not to have heard.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I spend part of the afternoon sewing pieces of waterproof stuff
together. He asks me:

"What are you doing?"

"I am making you a mask, to give you ether."

"Thank you; I can't bear the smell of chloroform."

I answer "Yes, that's why." The real reason is that we are not sure he
could bear the brutal chloroform, in his present state.

Leglise's leg was taken off at the thigh this morning. He was still
unconscious when we carried him into the dark room to examine his other
leg under the X-rays.

He was already beginning to moan and to open his eyes, and the
radiographer was not hurrying. I did all I could to hasten the business,
and to get him back into his bed. Thus he regained consciousness in
bright sunshine.

What would he, who once again was so close to the dark kingdom, have
thought if he had awakened in a gloom peopled by shadows, full of
whisperings, sparks and flashes of light?

As soon as he could speak, he said to me:

"You have cut off my leg?"

I made a sign. His eyes filled, and as his head was low, the great tears
trickled on to the pillow.

To-day he is calmer. The first dressings were very painful. He looked at
the raw, bloody, oozing stump, trembling, and said:

"It looks pretty horrible!"

We took so many precautions that now