Sidney was very happy all that summer. She glowed with pride when her lover put through a difficult piece of work; flushed and palpitated when she heard his praises sung; grew to know, by a sort of intuition, when he was in the house. She wore his ring on a fine chain around her neck, and grew prettier every day.
Once or twice, however, when she was at home, away from the glamour, her early fears obsessed her. Would he always love her? He was so handsome and so gifted, and there were women who were mad about him. That was the gossip of the hospital. Suppose she married him and he tired of her? In her humility she thought that perhaps only her youth, and such charm as she had that belonged to youth, held him. And before her, always, she saw the tragic women of the wards.
K. had postponed his leaving until fall. Sidney had been insistent, and Harriet had topped the argument in her businesslike way. “If you insist on being an idiot and adopting the Rosenfeld family,” she said, “wait until September. The season for boarders doesn’t begin until fall.”
So K. waited for “the season,” and ate his heart out for Sidney in the interval.
Johnny Rosenfeld still lay in his ward, inert from the waist down. K. was his most frequent visitor. As a matter of fact, he was watching the boy closely, at Max Wilson’s request.
“Tell me when I’m to do it,” said Wilson, “and when the time comes, for God’s sake, stand by me. Come to the operation. He’s got so much confidence that I’ll help him that I don’t dare to fail.”
So K. came on visiting days, and, by special dispensation, on Saturday afternoons. He was teaching the boy basket-making. Not that he knew anything about it himself; but, by means of a blind teacher, he kept just one lesson ahead. The ward was intensely interested. It found something absurd and rather touching in this tall, serious young man with the surprisingly deft fingers, tying raffia knots.
The first basket went, by Johnny’s request, to Sidney Page.
“I want her to have it,” he said. “She got corns on her fingers from rubbing me when I came in first; and, besides—”
“Yes?” said K. He was tying a most complicated knot, and could not look up.
“I know something,” said Johnny. “I’m not going to get in wrong by talking, but I know something. You give her the basket.”
K. looked up then, and surprised Johnny’s secret in his face.
“Ah!” he said.
“If I’d squealed she’d have finished me for good. They’ve got me, you know. I’m not running in 2.40 these days.”
“I’ll not tell, or make it uncomfortable for you. What do you know?”
Johnny looked around. The ward was in the somnolence of mid-afternoon. The nearest patient, a man in a wheel-chair, was snoring heavily.
“It was the dark-eyed one that changed the medicine on me,” he said. “The one with the heels that were always tapping around, waking me up. She did it; I saw her.”
After all, it was only what K. had suspected before. But a sense of impending danger to Sidney obsessed him. If Carlotta would do that, what would she do when she learned of the engagement? And he had known her before. He believed she was totally unscrupulous. The odd coincidence of their paths crossing again troubled him.
Carlotta Harrison was well again, and back on duty. Luckily for Sidney, her three months’ service in the operating-room kept them apart. For Carlotta was now not merely jealous. She found herself neglected, ignored. It ate her like a fever.
But she did not yet suspect an engagement. It had been her theory that Wilson would not marry easily—that, in a sense, he would have to be coerced into marriage. Some clever woman would marry him some day, and no one would be more astonished than himself. She thought merely that Sidney was playing a game like her own, with different weapons. So she planned her battle, ignorant that she had lost already.
Her method was simple enough. She stopped sulking, met Max with smiles, made no overtures toward a renewal of their relations. At first this annoyed him. Later it piqued him. To desert a woman was justifiable, under certain circumstances. But to desert a woman, and have her apparently not even know it, was against the rules of the game.
During a surgical dressing in a private room, one day, he allowed his fingers to touch hers, as on that day a year before when she had taken Miss Simpson’s place in his office. He was rewarded by the same slow, smouldering glance that had caught his attention before. So she was only acting indifference!
Then Carlotta made her second move. A new interne had come into the house, and was going through the process of learning that from a senior at the medical school to a half-baked junior interne is a long step back. He had to endure the good-humored contempt of the older men, the patronizing instructions of nurses as to rules.
Carlotta alone treated him with deference. His uneasy rounds in Carlotta’s precinct took on the state and form of staff visitations. She flattered, cajoled, looked up to him.
After a time it dawned on Wilson that this junior cub was getting more attention than himself: that, wherever he happened to be, somewhere in the offing would be Carlotta and the Lamb, the latter eyeing her with worship. Her indifference had only piqued him. The enthroning of a successor galled him. Between them, the Lamb suffered mightily—was subject to frequent “bawling out,” as he termed it, in the operating-room as he assisted the anaesthetist. He took his troubles to Carlotta, who soothed him in the corridor—in plain sight of her quarry, of course—by putting a sympathetic hand on his sleeve.
Then, one day, Wilson was goaded to speech.
“For the love of Heaven, Carlotta,” he said impatiently, “stop making love to that wretched boy. He wriggles like a worm if you look at him.”
“I like him. He is thoroughly genuine. I respect him, and—he respects me.”
“It’s rather a silly game, you know.”
“What game?”
