about his ears and to perturb the working of the
staff and nurses for twenty-four hours to come.

But, as already stated, the Doctor was in a remarkably gracious mood.
When informed by the steward, in fear and trembling, of the man's
unexpected take-off, his lips did not so much as form one syllable of
censure; nay, they were so pursed that snatches of rag-time floated
softly from them, to be broken only by a pleasant query after the health
of the other's eldest-born. The steward, deeming it impossible that he
could have caught the gist of the case, repeated it.

"Yes, yes," Doctor Bicknell said impatiently; "I understand. But how
about Semper Idem? Is he ready to leave?"

"Yes. They're helping him dress now," the steward answered, passing on
to the round of his duties, content that peace still reigned within the
iodine-saturated walls.

It was Semper Idem's recovery which had so fully compensated Doctor
Bicknell for the loss of the sailorman. Lives were to him as nothing,
the unpleasant but inevitable incidents of the profession, but cases,
ah, cases were everything. People who knew him were prone to brand him a
butcher, but his colleagues were at one in the belief that a bolder
and yet a more capable man never stood over the table. He was not an
imaginative man. He did not possess, and hence had no tolerance for,
emotion. His nature was accurate, precise, scientific. Men were to him
no more than pawns, without individuality or personal value. But as
cases it was different. The more broken a man was, the more precarious
his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor
Bicknell. He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a
common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of
life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and Judy for a
circus.

So it had been in the case of Semper Idem. The mystery of the man had
not appealed to him, nor had his silence and the veiled romance which
the yellow reporters had so sensationally and so fruitlessly exploited
in divers Sunday editions. But Semper Idem's throat had been cut. That
was the point. That was where his interest had centred. Cut from ear to
ear, and not one surgeon in a thousand to give a snap of the fingers
for his chance of recovery. But, thanks to the swift municipal ambulance
service and to Doctor Bicknell, he had been dragged back into the world
he had sought to leave. The Doctor's co-workers h