ter the doctor made his rounds, pronouncing Selwyn's wound as
not dangerous, but assuring him he was lucky to be alive. Another inch
either way and---- Passing on to the Scotsman, he stayed a considerable
length of time; but as the screen was set for the examination, the
American had no way of knowing its nature.

And so, with constant badinage, seldom brilliant, but never unkind, the
morning wore on. It was nearly noon when Selwyn saw a wheeled stretcher
brought into the ward and the Highlander lifted on to it.

'Jock,' said the little Cockney, 'I 'opes as 'ow everythink will come out
orlright.'

'By Gar, Scoachie!' cried the French-Canadian, 'I am sorree. You are one
dam fine feller, Scoachie.'

'Dinna worry yersel's,' said the man from the North. 'I'm rare an' lucky
that it's to be ma richt leg an' no the left, for that richt shank o'
mine was aye a wee thing crookit at the knee, and didna dae credit tae
the airchitecture o' tither ane.'

Thus, amid the rough encouragement of his fellows, and by no means
unconscious of the dignity of his position, the Highland soldier was
taken away to the operating-room.

The French-Canadian made a remark to Selwyn, but it was not until the
second repetition that he heard him.

III.

About three o'clock that afternoon a little stream of visitors began to
arrive, and Thomas Atkins, with his extraordinary adaptability, gravely,
if somewhat inaccurately, answered the catechism of well-meaning old
ladies, and flirted heartily and openly with giggling 'flappers.'

To the visitors, however, Austin Selwyn paid no heed. He was enduring
the lassitude which follows a fever. He knew that the crisis had come,
the hour when he must face fairly the crash and ruin of his work; but he
put it off as something to which his brain was unequal. Like slow
drifting wisps of cloud, different phrases and incidents floated across
his mind, shadows of things that had left a clear imprint upon his
senses. With the odd vagrancy of an undirected mind, he found himself
recalling a few of Hamlet's lines, and smiled wanly to think how, after
all those years, the immortal Shakespeare could still give words to his
own thoughts: 'This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile
promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, . . . this brave
overhanging firmament--this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapo