rolled to a little distance upon the floor. Picking it up he
handed it back to her, but she placed it indifferently upon the table.
Her attitude, with its dull quiet of sensation, impressed him at the
instant almost more than the greater importance of what she told him.
Was it this acceptance of the thing, he wondered, which appeared to rob
it of all terror in her mind? and was the dumb resignation in her face
and voice, merely an expression of the physical listlessness of despair?
There was about her now that peculiar dignity which belongs less to the
human creature than to the gravity of the moment in which he stands; and
he remembered vividly that he had never watched any soul in the supreme
crisis of its experience without the stirring in himself of a strange
sentiment of reverence. Even the most abandoned was covered in that
exalted hour by some last rag of honour.

"Then you have suffered great pain?" he asked, because no other words
came to him that he could utter.

"Weeks ago--yes--but not now. It does not hurt me now."

"And you thought, yourself, that it was so serious as this?"

She shook her head. "Oh, no, I never thought of it. When it came I drove
it off with brandy."

The absence in her of any appeal for pity moved him far more than the
loudest outcry could have done.

"Poor girl!" he said, and stopped in terror, lest he had obtruded the
personal element into a situation which seemed so devoid of feeling.

"It was a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without
looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as
having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be
helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it
wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till
to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over
just exactly what it was before. Not at first, perhaps--oh, I know, not
at first!--but afterward, when things bored me, the taste would come
back again."

"Hush!" he said quickly, with a forward movement, "hush! you shall not
think such things!"

"The taste would come back again!" she repeated, with a kind of savage
sternness. "I am not strong and the doctor told me long ago that there
was no cure."

"Then he lied--there is always a cure."

"There is not--there is not," she insisted harshly, dwelling upon the
words because in them she found a keen agony which relieved her letharg