likes to be with you. What about you?"

Sidney had been sitting in a low chair by the fire. She rose with a
sudden passionate movement. In the informality of the household, she,
had visited K. in her dressing-gown and slippers; and now she stood
before him, a tragic young figure, clutching the folds of her gown
across her breast.

"I worship him, K.," she said tragically. "When I see him coming, I want
to get down and let him walk on me. I know his step in the hall. I
know the very way he rings for the elevator. When I see him in the
operating-room, cool and calm while every one else is flustered and
excited, he--he looks like a god."

Then, half ashamed of her outburst, she turned her back to him and stood
gazing at the small coal fire. It was as well for K. that she did not
see his face. For that one moment the despair that was in him shone in
his eyes. He glanced around the shabby little room, at the sagging bed,
the collar-box, the pincushion, the old marble-topped bureau under which
Reginald had formerly made his nest, at his untidy table, littered with
pipes and books, at the image in the mirror of his own tall figure,
stooped and weary.

"It's real, all this?" he asked after a pause. "You're sure it's not
just--glamour, Sidney?"

"It's real--terribly real." Her voice was muffled, and he knew then that
she was crying.

She was mightily ashamed of it. Tears, of course, except in the privacy
of one's closet, were not ethical on the Street.

"Perhaps he cares very much, too."

"Give me a handkerchief," said Sidney in a muffled tone, and the little
scene was broken into while K. searched through a bureau drawer. Then:

"It's all over, anyhow, since this. If he'd really cared he'd have come
over to-night. When one is in trouble one needs friends."

Back in a circle she came inevitably to her suspension. She would never
go back, she said passionately. She was innocent, had been falsely
accused. If they could think such a thing about her, she didn't want to
be in their old hospital.

K. questioned her, alternately soothing and probing.

"You are positive about it?"

"Absolutely. I have given him his medicines dozens of times."

"You looked at the label?"

"I swear I did, K."

"Who else had access to the medicine closet?"

"Carlotta Harrison carried the keys, of course. I was off duty from four
to six. When Carlotta left the ward, the probationer would have them."

"Have you reason to think that eit