"Then he must be brought here, and we'll nurse him." "You," said Johanna; "why, the doctor wouldn't let 'ee touch him—and reason good, too; but I'll tend 'en, and thank 'ee for letting me."

So the two women, glowing, one with penitence and the other with gratitude, made their simple plans.

And the doctor agreed. Wilmot never forgot the sudden, moved look he turned upon her. It seemed, indeed, that he had thought of this plan, but had scarcely dared to propose it. Then Wilmot remembered that before his marriage the house at Dashpers had been a sort of refuge for derelict human beings, mostly children of struggling old friends, who wanted sea air.

So the lad, Pharaoh Grose, was brought there at once, and Johanna entered on the work, which to a trained nurse would have been repellant. That night the consultingroom was brilliantly lit by all the lamps that could be procured, fixed round the table to which the lad had been carried it was an operating-table brought from Regiswear that morning, for Dr. Borlace had roused himself to send for a surgeon and make an effort to save the lad's life by removing the thigh, hoping in that way to prevent the gangrene rising higher. Wilmot watched the trained nurse who had arrived with the doctor moving round the brightly lit room. She kept her eyes fixed on the two doctors, who stood talking in a low voice in the window.

She could only see her husband's face, and on it she read the drama that was passing, as one gazing into a crowded room through a chink which only revealed two figures-but those the central ones.

In heavy, set determination she saw Dr. Borlace return again and again to the charge: he was trying every argument, using every appeal, with a life-and-death earnestness, that

but grew at every shrug of refusal from his colleague, the surgeon summoned to operate. What was it? she asked herself. She could see in the taut lines of the only face visible to her that it meant-more than life or death to him, the chance to retrieve an act of misjudgment.

Coming out suddenly, Johanna, who had been helping the nurse, shut the door firmly behind her, and drew her mistress upstairs.

"What is it, Johanna?" she gasped.

"He's a coward, an infernal coward," said Johanna, in low, earnest tones, for the emotional tension in the men had aroused her passion.

"Who?"

"The other man-the man the doctor sent for. Oh, if he'd but been a man, they might ha' saved the lad, and Dr. Tony wouldn't never have had to feel he'd killed 'en."

She had so entirely identified herself with the doctor, that she forgot how she was putting the worst case before her mistress. There certainly was in Dr. Tony the magnetic power which causes one person to fill the stage.

"But why? Why won't he?"

"Oh, not enough light to see by. Must be daylight, or electric. Can't do it with lamps. My Heavens! he don't want to see him die under his hands, that's what that means." "But why not Tony?"

Johanna understood. "One couldn't do it, they say, there's so many arteries to tie, and 'tother chap won't stir a finger till daylight."

But the curtain of merciful darkness went down over Wilmot, and from her faint she only recovered to enter into the struggle for her child's life and her own.

The doctor who had been summoned only to give a death sentence, had the affair of a new life on his hands, and before dawn Pharaoh Grose was dead and the new life

come. In fact, another humbler life, too, was gone, for Diogenes had to be mercifully restored to Nirvana by the doctor's own hands. The anger of Challacombe and of the Grose family being by no means appeased by the doctor's care for the dead lad, every dependent of the Dashpers household must be made to suffer for its connection with it -and the first to suffer was Diogenes.

In the days of boxing matches, the natural venom of man's nature was excreted from his system by the honest breaking of noses or blacking of eyes, but now insulting postcards or "injunctions to restrain," the postal system or the lawyer's office, are the feeble means of clearing the inflamed system of its hate, for no civilization has yet succeeded in making man anything but a peculiarly aggravating creature to his own kind.

Now, Challacombe was midway between these two methods, and, understanding the system of neither, could allow its crowd to maul the captain of the Fear Naught, without calling for man to man and fair play; and, on the other hand, could stoop to petty persecution of Dr. Borlace. There are but two ways of holding such an outpost on the boundaries of civilization as Challacombe, and those are, either to be a saint with a strong dash of heroism, or a "substantial " man, with a pronounced inclination to autocracy and an eye to one's bank balance. Unfortunately, Dr. Borlace was neither, but all things by turns and nothing long. Sometimes devoted, he often neglected his cases, and the neglect was noted and not the devotion. Above all, his science was aggressive among minds inaccessible to the arguments of the microscope, his crowning misdemeanour being the closing of the ancient "pipe-well," famed for its coldness-and yet polluted. For in Challacombe, germs, instead of being hoary iniquities, were new-fangled, and with flippant tongue and careless manners the doctor fought

M

the germs of the slums and the smugness of the parlours, not without a threatened rise in the rates, for the new watersupply.

Absorbed just now in the wonder of her own life, Wilmot viewed, as from the spectators' gallery, her husband's conflict in the arena, and the slackening of moral fibre, which she suspected to have been the result of his lowered standard of public responsibility, for in the bustle of the town over the contracts for the new water-supply she saw but the fatal evidence of her husband's weakness. They had never re ferred again to the question of the lead-piping, though Wilmot, in secret, read every word of the Reports of the Council's proceedings, and listened for every echo of the district's opinion, though she felt herself raised far above the press of struggle, in some watch-tower of feminine superiority: unfortunately, however, the watch-tower is a fatal position for a wife.

It has chanced to most of us, standing within the gloom of some tall tower, to look down on the expanse of country below us, to watch the smoke rising from factory chimneys and household fires, and to catch a glimpse of the girdle of distant hills. Seen thus, each part of the picture is but the complement of the rest, and the roar of the factory, the dust of the road, and the toilsome ascent of the hills, bring no more weariness than do the meadow-paths themselvesto the watcher in the tower, who views not the difficulty of the life, but the ease of it. It is a Pisgah-sight, but a permanent residence on Pisgah is not advisable for a wife, unless her husband happens to be a Moses.

CHAPTER XVII

A ROMAN'S PART

THE light rose slowly up the wall of the room, like the shaft of a golden searchlight. Thrilling with the nervous life of returning health, Wilmot awoke to happy consciousness of the sunshine and to the wonderful power over the future that slept in the cradle beside her. With the blood burning in her face and tightly interlocked limbs she watched the radiance that widened and narrowed with the rise and fall of the blind in the wind. She remembered her old student's room, pasted with algebraical formulæ and Latin verb parts. In those days she used to begin her day by waking Uncle Dickie with a series of flying leaps from mat to mat on the polished floor, as she balanced herself on bare pink toes.

It was good to remember those wholesome days just now, as she slipped a finger under the baby's sleeve to feel its wonderful skin. In the passion of that sudden glory she laughed aloud, for back along the ages the spirit of the dear dead women thrilled in her again at the baby touch, warm with life and the promise of it, yet old with the very woody savour of the tree of life. How foolish the man seemed who talked of the "waxen" touches of a baby: it took a man to say anything so ignorant as that. For now she knew one at least of the three touches in which flesh speaks plainly the waxen cold of death that awaits dissolution, the burning warmth of new life, the clasp of passion that with thundering shock brings soul to soul.