ath? In what form?"

"Slow, sure fingers, shutting off his breath. Do you need further
details or will the dry, scientific term, epithelioma, be enough?" The
voice came grim out of the gloom. No answer being returned, it
continued: "I've had easier jobs than telling Ned Worth. It was hopeless
from the first. My old friend, Death, had too long a start on me."

"Was it something that affected his mind?"

"No. His mind was perfectly clear. Vividly clear. May I take my last
verdict, when it comes, with a spirit as clear and as noble."

Silence fell, and in the stillness we heard the Little Red Doctor
communing with memories. Now and then came a muttered word. "Suicide!"
in a snarl of scornful rejection. "Fool-made definitions!" Presently,
"Story for a romancer, not a physician." He seemed to be canvassing an
inadequacy in himself with dissatisfaction. Then, more clearly: "Love
from the first. At a glance, perhaps. The contagion of flame for powder.
But in that abyss together they saw each other's soul."

"The Little Red Doctor is turning poet," said Sheldon to me in an
incredulous whisper.

There was the snap and crackle of a match from the shadowed corner. The
keen, gnarled young face sprang from the darkness, vivid and softened
with a strange triumph, then receded behind an imperfect circle, clouded
the next instant by a nimbus of smoke. The Little Red Doctor spoke.

Ned Worth was my friend as well as my patient. No need to tell you men,
who knew him, why I was fond of him. I don't suppose any one ever came
in contact with that fantastic and smiling humanity of his without
loving him for it. "Immortal hilarity!" The phrase might have been
coined for him.

It wasn't as physician that I went home with Ned, after pronouncing
sentence upon him, but as friend. I didn't want him to be alone that
first night. Yet I dare say that any one, seeing the two of us, would
have thought me the one who had heard his life-limit defined. He was as
steady as a rock.

"No danger of my being a miser of life," he said. "You've given me leave
to spend freely what's left of it." Well, he spent. Freely and
splendidly!

The spacious old library on the second floor--you know it, Dominie,
smelt of disuse, as we entered, Ned's servant bringing up the rear with
a handbag. Dust had settled down like an army of occupation over
everything. The furniture was shrouded in denim. The tall clock in the
corner stood voiceless. Three months of desert