e of a wagon through the street, and the
shrilling of boys at a game.

She turned her face from the wall, fixed the pillows more easily under
her head, and stared into the room, her eyes narrowing in calculation as
she went lucidly back for the hundredth time since she had flung herself
there, to check off the details of that half hour with the man who
healed--or did not heal.

She had shrewdly rejected the specialist Birley had named for another
who would not know her. She wanted no mistaken kindness, no polite
reluctance or glossing, and she feared to find this in one who might
regard her as something more than a casual human body in evil case. She
had felt bound to have plain words. She would know what she faced as one
knows heat or cold.

And she had gained the full of her wish. The man had taken her as
casually as she offered herself. His questions were few, his examination
mechanically impersonal, his diagnosis cool and informing. She had felt
herself a culprit, listening to sentence.

"You think I have a year to live?"

"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way, without worry. Worry eats the
tissue even faster than those little vegetable parasites. I take it you
eliminate worry?" He drew on his gloves.

She smiled now, with pride in her cunning. Her simulation of unconcerned
curiosity had been perfect, as if it were another's wasting body she
brought him. She had hidden all that fond love of life, her life of
action, sensation; of hope ever enlarging, of fruitions certain,
innumerable, and dear. No sign had the practiced eyes read of the inner
rage that maddened her at thought of so much life unlived--life of mirth
and tears, height and depth, grief, ecstasy and common levels. She was
avid of them all, dared them all, wished only to play the game, vaunting
a fine zest for the sport with all its hazards.

She had found in her hour alone there that she did not fear death--only
detested it. She feared it as little as a child fears sleep; hated it as
a child, torn untimely from play, hates to go to bed.

"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way--eliminate worry." But she
knew she could not take it "this way;" could not give up as this judge
believed she had done. She must rebel to the last. As long as she played
she must play in the true spirit. She might be vanquished, but she would
not debase the sport. She smiled at a reminiscence of her brother's
college life, catching at a phrase. "It seems I'm not a '