use and Dr. Abrams stayed chatting with Emily in the
passage for a considerable time. Any one of the opposite sex seemed to
hare an irresistible attraction for him.

When they went upstairs the doctor was so held by his burning curiosity
that it was difficult to lead him into Martin's bedroom. Everything
interested him; he bent down and felt the tablecloth with his dirty
thumb, then the soil round the hyacinth, then the blue china. Between
every investigation he stared at Maggie as though he were now seeing
her for the first time. At last, however, he was bending over Martin,
and his examination was clever and deft; he had been, like his patient,
used to better days. Martin was very ill.

"The boy's bad," he said, turning sharply round upon Maggie.

From the speaking of that word, for six days and six nights he was
Maggie's loyal friend and fellow-combatant. They fought, side by side,
in the great struggle for Martin's life. They won; but when Maggie
tried to look back afterwards on the history of that wrestling, she saw
nothing connectedly, only the candle-light springing and falling, the
little doctor's sharp eyes, the torn paper of the wall, the ragged
carpet, and always that strange mask that was Martin's face and yet the
face of a stranger, something tortured and fantastic, passing from
Chinese immobility to frenzied pain, from pain to sweating exhaustion,
from exhaustion back to immobility.

On the eighth day she rose, as a swimmer rises from green depths, and
saw the sunshine and the landscape again.

"He'll do if you're careful," said Dr. Abrams, and suddenly became once
more the curious, dirty, sensual little creature that he had been at
first. Her only contact with the outer world had been her visits to the
neighbouring streets for necessaries and one journey to the bank (the
nearest branch was in Oxford Street) to settle about her money. But
now, with the doctor's words, the rest of the world came back to her.
She remembered Paul. She was horrified to realise that during these
days she had entirely forgotten him. He, of course could not write to
her because he did not know her address. When she saw that Martin was
quietly sleeping she sat down and wrote the following letter:

13A LYNTON STREET, KING'S CROSS, April 28th, 1912.

MY DEAR PAUL,--I have been very wrong indeed not to write to you before
this. It's only of a piece with all my other bad behaviour to you, and
it's very late now to saw that I a