t's what I want to know. It's time that they found out, if they're
ever going to."

The doctor's glasses fell off with a click, and then hung, swinging,
from their thick black cord. When their oscillation had all ended,--

"What has started up your curiosity just now, Reed?"

"Signs of the times, I suppose," Reed answered crisply. "What's more,
doctor, I don't quite like them."

Bending forward, the doctor laid a steady hand upon the lean wrist
beside him. As he had supposed, the pulse was leaping with a furious
unsteadiness.

"Who taught a mere engineer like you to read the signs?" he demanded.

The pulse raced a little faster. Then Reed replied,--

"My inherent common sense."

"Your inherent self-conceit, you'd better say," the doctor retorted
curtly. "What's more, you lay awake to read them? Three quarters of the
night? Yes? I thought so. Next time, though, I'll trouble you to let
your signs alone. You've got to learn their alphabet straight, before
you go to work to get much meaning out of them. Anyway, they are my
care, not yours." Then, as the pulse steadied down a little, the doctor
spoke more gently. "Boy, what is it that you need to know?"

Under the strong, heedful fingers, the pulse gave one great leap,
stopped, then fell to pounding madly. Meanwhile, there came a
tightening of Opdyke's lips. Then he said, with a voice devoid of any
intonation,--

"Doctor, I think it has come to where I need to know the outcome of all
this."

"Reed boy, I thought so." The doctor's hand, leaving the wrist, came to
rest upon the nearer shoulder with a grip which was like a benediction.
"It has been a fearful time of waiting. I wish I could tell you what
the end will be; but--Reed, I can't."

"You mean you won't," Opdyke corrected him a little sharply.

But Doctor Keltridge forgave the sharpness, as his eyes rested on the
drawn, white face.

"I mean I can't," he iterated. "Reed, that's the damned cruelty of the
whole position, for you and for us who care for you. It would have been
any amount easier to have accepted things at their worst, months ago,
than to keep on in this grilling indecision, fearing everything and yet
hanging on to every vestige of hope for something better. Don't think I
haven't been realizing that, my boy, ever since they brought you in and
tucked you up in that infernal bed. It wouldn't have been one half so
hard for you, then, or since, if you'd known that you'd step down and
out of it a