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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah!" he said.

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

"I'll not tell, or make it uncomfortable for you. What do you know?"

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

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

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

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

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