all through. Still,
it would be a feather in one's cap."

He brooded fiercely, intently, like a hound on a hot scent. People
turned to look at the big, shabby young man with the sunken, burning
eyes that stared through them as though they had been so many shadows.
He did not, in fact, see them at all. He made his way by sheer
instinct across the crowded street.

"She's terribly afraid of death," Francey said. "It's awful to be so
afraid. It must make life itself terrible."

"They'll operate soon as they dare--an exploratory operation. If only
I could have a say--a real say! It's maddening to know so much--to be
sure of oneself. I don't believe Rogers would take me out on his
private work if he knew I knew all I do. I'm glad we're on a surgical
post together, Francey. I don't know what I'd do if I hadn't got you
to talk things over with."

"You daren't talk of anything else," she answered unexpectedly.
"You're frightened of our being happy together. You're always trying
to justify yourself."

"I'm not--what rubbish!"

He tried to laugh at her. It was so like Francey to dash off down a
side issue. And yet it was true. He did try to think as much as he
could of that side of their common life. It did add an appearance of
stability and reason to the splendid unreason of his loving her. It
made up to him for those dismaying breaks when her face and body stood
like a scorching pillar of fire between himself and his work, to find
that when they were together they could be sternly practical, discuss
their eases and criticize their superiors as though, beneath it all,
there were not this golden, insurgent sea whose high tides swirled over
his landmarks. Not destroying them.

In those latter times he loved her humbly, with wonder and passionate
self-abasement. But in their work they stood further away from one
another. He could criticize her, and that gave him a heady sense of
power and freedom. He never forgot the year that she had deliberately
thrown away. And even now, when she stood at the beginning of the road
which he had already passed over, she seemed to him full of strange
curiosities and wayward, purposeless interests. There were days when
an ugly Chinese print, picked up in some back-street pawnshop, or the
misfortunes of one of her raffish hangers-on, or some wild student rag,
appeared to wipe out the vital business of life. She was known to be
brilliant, but he distrusted her power of l