an almost feverish
impatience. I fear he doubts me--after all these years!"

"And when he knows?"

The man by the fire shrank deeper in his chair.

"When he knows?" he repeated. "Why, then he will have an opportunity to
understand my life-long devotion, my gratitude, my love! That is all."

CHAPTER XVI

"For real emergencies," Doctor Ledyard once remarked to Helen Travers,
"give me the nervous, high-strung women. They come through shock and
danger better, they hold to a climax more steadily. Your phlegmatic woman
goes to pieces because she hasn't imagination and vision enough to carry
her over the present."

This reasoning caused him to select Priscilla Glenn for one of the most
critical operations he had ever performed. Among the blue and white
nurses of his knowledge this girl with the strange, uplifted expression
of face; this girl who was actually on the lookout for experience and
practice, and who seriously loved her profession, stood in a class by
herself. He had long had his eye upon her, had meant to single her out.
And now the opportunity had come.

Perhaps the most important man in business circles, certainly one of the
richest men in the city, had come to that period of his life's career
when he must pay toll for the things he had done and left undone in his
past. The broad, common gateway gaped wide for him, and only one chance
presented itself as a possible means of holding him back from the long
journey he so shudderingly contemplated.

"One chance in ten?" he questioned.

"One--in----" Ledyard had hesitated.

"A hundred?"

"A thousand."

A breathless pause followed. Then:

"And if I do not take it, how long?"

"A week, a month; not longer."

"I'll take it."

"I'll have my partner----Would you care for any one else?" Ledyard asked.

"No. Since it must be, I put myself in your hands. I trust you above any
one I know. Do your best for me, and in case I slip through your fingers
I thank you now, and--good-bye."

Before any great event, or operation, Ledyard was supersensitive, highly
wrought, and nervous. When he heard the announcement that day of the
operation: "All is ready, sir!" he stepped, gowned and masked, into the
operating-room, and was aware of a senseless inclination to ask some
one--he did not know whom--to make less noise and to lower the shades.
Then his eye fell, not on the dignified and serene head nurse, not on the
other ghostly young forms in their places nea