didn’t do it, you didn’t do it’; and all the time something inside of me was saying, ‘Not now, perhaps; but sometime you may.’”
Poor K., who had reasoned all this out for himself and had come to the same impasse!
“To go on like this, feeling that one has life and death in one’s hand, and then perhaps some day to make a mistake like that!” She looked up at him forlornly. “I am just not brave enough, K.”
“Wouldn’t it be braver to keep on? Aren’t you giving up very easily?”
Her world was in pieces about her, and she felt alone in a wide and empty place. And, because her nerves were drawn taut until they were ready to snap, Sidney turned on him shrewishly.
“I think you are all afraid I will come back to stay. Nobody really wants me anywhere—in all the world! Not at the hospital, not here, not anyplace. I am no use.”
“When you say that nobody wants you,” said K., not very steadily, “I—I think you are making a mistake.”
“Who?” she demanded. “Christine? Aunt Harriet? Katie? The only person who ever really wanted me was my mother, and I went away and left her!”
She scanned his face closely, and, reading there something she did not understand, she colored suddenly.
“I believe you mean Joe Drummond.”
“No; I do not mean Joe Drummond.”
If he had found any encouragement in her face, he would have gone on recklessly; but her blank eyes warned him.
“If you mean Max Wilson,” said Sidney, “you are entirely wrong. He’s not in love with me—not, that is, any more than he is in love with a dozen girls. He likes to be with me—oh, I know that; but that doesn’t mean—anything else. Anyhow, after this disgrace—”
“There is no disgrace, child.”
“He’ll think me careless, at the least. And his ideals are so high, K.”
“You say he likes to be with you. What about you?”
Sidney had been sitting in a low chair by the fire. She rose with a sudden passionate movement. In the informality of the household, she, had visited K. in her dressing-gown and slippers; and now she stood before him, a tragic young figure, clutching the folds of her gown across her breast.
“I worship him, K.,” she said tragically. “When I see him coming, I want to get down and let him walk on me. I know his step in the hall. I know the very way he rings for the elevator. When I see him in the operating-room, cool and calm while every one else is flustered and excited, he—he looks like a god.”
Then, half ashamed of her outburst, she turned her back to him and stood gazing at the small coal fire. It was as well for K. that she did not see his face. For that one moment the despair that was in him shone in his eyes. He glanced around the shabby little room, at the sagging bed, the collar-box, the pincushion, the old marble-topped bureau under which Reginald had formerly made his nest, at his untidy table, littered with pipes and books, at the image in the mirror of his own tall figure, stooped and weary.
“It’s real, all this?” he asked after a pause. “You’re sure it’s not just—glamour, Sidney?”
“It’s real—terribly real.” Her voice was muffled, and he knew then that she was crying.
She was mightily ashamed of it. Tears, of course, except in the privacy of one’s closet, were not ethical on the Street.
“Perhaps he cares very much, too.”
“Give me a handkerchief,” said Sidney in a muffled tone, and the little scene was broken into while K. searched through a bureau drawer. Then:
“It’s all over, anyhow, since this. If he’d really cared he’d have come over tonight. When one is in trouble one needs friends.”
Back in a circle she came inevitably to her suspension. She would never go back, she said passionately. She was innocent, had been falsely accused. If they could think such a thing about her, she didn’t want to be in their old hospital.
K. questioned her, alternately soothing and probing.
“You are positive about it?”
“Absolutely. I have given him his medicines dozens of times.”
“You looked at the label?”
“I swear I did, K.”
“Who else had access to the medicine closet?”
“Carlotta Harrison carried the keys, of course. I was off duty from four to six. When Carlotta left the ward, the probationer would have them.”
“Have you reason to think that either one of these girls would wish you harm?”
“None whatever,” began Sidney vehemently; and then, checking herself,—“unless—but that’s rather ridiculous.”
“What is ridiculous?”
“I’ve sometimes thought that Carlotta—but I am sure she is perfectly fair with me. Even if she—if she—”
“Yes?”
