an how a patient was constructed or deranged
couldn't be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but
some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When
that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly,
pity; and when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike,
in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference
but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now--she would
always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment
she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the
greater ease to himself as there wasn't one of her divinations that--as
her own--he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was
making her talk she _was_ talking; and what it could, at any rate, come
to for him was that she wasn't afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest
thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn't;
which undertaking of hers--not to have misled him--was what she counted
at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as
good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really _be_
misled; and there actually passed between them for some seconds a sign,
a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This
made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then
what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and
the whole thing wound up, for that consummation, with its kind dim
smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but
brightness--that even of sharp steel--was of course for the other side
of the business, and it would all come in for her in one way or
another. "Do you mean," he asked, "that you've no relations at
all?--not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?"

She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or
a freak of nature at a show. "Nobody whatever." But the last thing she
had come for was to be dreary about it. "I'm a survivor--a survivor of
a general wreck. You see," she added, "how that's to be taken into
account--that everyone else _has_ gone. When I was ten years old there
were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I'm all that's left. But
they died," she went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I'm American. Not that I
mean that makes me worse. However, you'll probably