d his papers with precise hands.

"I'm sorry--I know you came here as a joke. It isn't--not for you.
It's serious." He saw her smile, and though he went on speaking in the
same quiet, methodical tone, he felt that he had suddenly lost control
of himself. "Medical science isn't an exact science. Doctors are
never sure of anything until it has happened. But speaking with that
reservation I have to tell you that your case is hopeless--that you
have three--at the most four months----"

She had interrupted with a laugh, but the laugh itself had broken in
half. She had read his face. After a long interval she asked a
question--one word--almost inaudibly--and he nodded.

"If you had come earlier one might have operated," he said. "But even
so, it would have been doubtful."

Already many men and women had received their final sentence here in
this room, and each had met it in his own way. The women were the
quietest. Perhaps their lives had taught them to endure the hideous
indignity of a well-ordered death-bed without that galling sense of
physical humiliation which tormented men. For the most part they
became immersed in practical issues--how the news was to be broken to
others, who would look after the house and the children, and how the
last scene might be acted with the least possible inconvenience and
distress for those who would have to witness it. Some men had raved
and stormed and pleaded, as though he had been a judge whose judgment
might be revoked: "Not me--others--not me--not to-day--years hence."
They had paced his private room for hours, trying to get a hold over
themselves, devastated with shame and horror at the breakdown of their
confident personalities. Some had risen to an impregnable dignity,
finer than their lives. One or two had laughed.

And this woman?

He looked up at last. He thought with a thrill that was not of pity,
of a bird hit in full flight and mortally hurt, panting out its life in
the heather, its gay plumage limp and dishevelled. The jewels and
outrageous dress had become a jest that had turned against her. A
shadow of the empty, good-humoured smile still lingered on a painted
mouth palsied with fear. She was swaying slightly, rhythmically,
backwards and forwards, and rubbing the palms of her hands on the
carved arms of her chair, and he could hear her breath, short and
broken like the shallow breathing of a sick animal. And yet he became
aware that she was thinking