u take me thar!"

"But you can't go, Mr. Hawkins. No one but the surgeons and nurses can
be with her. Besides, the nurse who was just here said she had regained
consciousness, and it might excite her to see you."

She might as well have tried to stop a mountain torrent. He brushed past
her and was making his way to the elevator before she had ceased
speaking. At the open door of the operating-room on the fourth floor he
paused. On a long white table lay the patient, a white-clad doctor on
either side of her, and a nurse in the background sorting a handful of
gleaming instruments. With two strides the old man reached the girl's
side.

"Sal!" he said fiercely, bending over her, "air ye wuss?"

Her dazed eyes cleared slightly.

"I dunno, Pop," she murmured feebly.

"Ye ain't fixin' to die, air ye?" he persisted.

"I dunno, Pop."

"Don't you let 'em skeer you," he commanded sternly. "You keep on
a-fightin'. Don't you dare give up. Sal, do you hear me?"

The girl's wavering consciousness steadied, and for a moment the
challenge that the old man flung at death was valiantly answered in her
pain-racked eyes.

For an hour and a half the surgeons worked. The case, critical enough at
best, was greatly complicated by the long delay. Twice further effort
seemed useless, and it was only by the prompt administration of oxygen
that the end was averted. During the nerve-racking suspense Pop not only
refused to leave the room, he even refused to stand back from the table.
With keen, suspicious eyes he followed every movement of the surgeons'
hands. Only once did he speak out, and that was in the beginning, to an
interne who was administering the anaesthetic:

"Lift that funnel, you squash-headed fool!" he thundered; "don't you see
hit's marking of her cheek?"

When the work was finished and the unconscious patient had been taken
down to her ward, Pop still kept his place beside her. With his hand on
her pulse he watched her breathing, watched the first faint quivering of
her lids, the restlessness that grew into pain and later into agony.
Hour after hour he sat there and passed with her through that
crucifixion that follows some capital operations.

On his refusal at luncheon time to leave the bedside Miss Fletcher
ignored the rules and sent him a tray; but when night came and he still
refused to go, she became impatient.

"You can't stay in here to-night, Mr. Hawkins," she said firmly. "I have
asked one of the orderli