ty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that
night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior
Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried
about things he had done and shouldn't have, and things he should
have done and hadn't. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he
wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he
had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also
wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children's
ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the
"Rosary" over and over. His last conscious thought was that the
hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a
string of pearls.

The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the
exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook
his head over Johnny's record.

"A little slow, Nellie," he said. "A little slow."

Jane Brown took a long breath.

"Doctor Willie," she said, "won't you have him operated on?"

He looked up at her over his spectacles.

"Operated on? What for?"

"Well, he's not getting any better," she managed desperately.
"I'm--sometimes I think he'll die while we're waiting for him to get
better."

He was surprised, but he was not angry.

"There's no fracture, child," he said gently. "If there is a clot
there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The
trouble with you," he said indulgently, "is that you have come here,
where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best
surgeon, child."

She cast about her despairingly for some way to tell him the truth.
But even when she spoke she knew she was foredoomed to failure.

"But--suppose the Staff thinks that he should be?"

Doctor Willie's kindly mouth set itself into grim lines.

"The Staff!" he said, and looked at her searchingly. Then his jaws
set at an obstinate angle.

"Well, Nellie," he said, "I guess one opinion's as good as another
in these cases. And I don't suppose they'll do any cutting and
hacking without my consent." He looked at Johnny's unconscious
figure. "He never amounted to much," he added, "but it's surprising
the way money's been coming in to pay his board here. Your mother
sent five dollars. A good lot of people are interested in him. I
can't see myself going home and telling them he died on the
operating table."

He patted her on the arm as he went out.