face downward on the bed and lay without moving for hours. And of these periods of despair he was always heartily ashamed the next day.
The meeting with Max Wilson took place early in September, and under better circumstances than he could have hoped for.
Sidney had come home for her weekly visit, and her mother’s condition had alarmed her for the first time. When Le Moyne came home at six o’clock, he found her waiting for him in the hall.
“I am just a little frightened, K.,” she said. “Do you think mother is looking quite well?”
“She has felt the heat, of course. The summer—I often think—”
“Her lips are blue!”
“It’s probably nothing serious.”
“She says you’ve had Dr. Ed over to see her.”
She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face.
Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.
“I shall come home, of course. It’s tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother—”
She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she looked up.
“I’m much braver than this in the hospital. But when it’s one’s own!”
K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson, not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood—back even to Joe.
But, with Anna’s precarious health and Harriet’s increasing engrossment in her business, he felt it more and more necessary that Sidney go on with her training. A profession was a safeguard. And there was another point: it had been decided that Anna was not to know her condition. If she was not worried she might live for years. There was no surer way to make her suspect it than by bringing Sidney home.
Sidney sent Katie to ask Dr. Ed to come over after dinner. With the sunset Anna seemed better. She insisted on coming downstairs, and even sat with them on the balcony until the stars came out, talking of Christine’s trousseau, and, rather fretfully, of what she would do without the parlors.
“You shall have your own boudoir upstairs,” said Sidney valiantly. “Katie can carry your tray up there. We are going to make the sewing-room into your private sitting-room, and I shall nail the machine-top down.”
This pleased her. When K. insisted on carrying her upstairs, she went in a flutter.
“He is so strong, Sidney!” she said, when he had placed her on her bed. “How can a clerk, bending over a ledger, be so muscular? When I have callers, will it be all right for Katie to show them upstairs?”
She dropped asleep before the doctor came; and when, at something after eight, the door of the Wilson house slammed and a figure crossed the street, it was not Ed at all, but the surgeon.
Sidney had been talking rather more frankly than usual. Lately there had been a reserve about her. K., listening intently that night, read between words a story of small persecutions and jealousies. But the girl minimized them, after her way.
“It’s always hard for probationers,” she said. “I often think Miss Harrison is trying my mettle.”
“Harrison!”
“Carlotta Harrison. And now that Miss Gregg has said she will accept me, it’s really all over. The other nurses are wonderful—so kind and so helpful. I hope I shall look well in my cap.”
Carlotta Harrison was in Sidney’s hospital! A thousand contingencies flashed through his mind. Sidney might grow to like her and bring her to the house. Sidney might insist on the thing she always spoke of—that he visit the hospital; and he would meet her, face to face. He could have depended on a man to keep his secret. This girl with her somber eyes and her threat to pay him out for what had happened to her—she meant danger of a sort that no man could fight.
“Soon,” said Sidney, through the warm darkness, “I shall have a cap, and be always forgetting it and putting my hat on over it—the new ones always do. One of the girls slept in hers the other night! They are tulle, you know, and quite stiff, and it was the most erratic-looking thing the next day!”
It was then that the door across the street closed. Sidney did not hear it, but K. bent forward. There was a part of his brain always automatically on watch.
“I shall get my operating-room training, too,” she went on. “That is the real romance of the hospital. A—a surgeon is a sort of hero in a hospital. You wouldn’t think that, would you? There was a lot of excitement to-day. Even the probationers’ table was talking about it. Dr. Max Wilson did the Edwardes operation.”
The figure across the Street was lighting a cigarette. Perhaps, after all—
“Something tremendously difficult—I don’t know what. It’s going into the medical journals. A Dr. Edwardes invented it, or whatever they call it. They took a picture of the operating-room for the article. The photographer had to put on operating clothes and wrap the camera in sterilized towels. It was the most thrilling thing, they say —”
Her voice died away as her eyes followed K.‘s. Max, cigarette in hand, was coming across, under the ailanthus tree. He hesitated on the pavement, his eyes searching the shadowy balcony.
“Sidney?”
“Here! Right back here!”
There was vibrant gladness in her tone. He came slowly toward them.
