years, had all the time
known from within. He would make Amy understand; if Ruth came, Amy would
be good to her. At heart she was not like those others, and happiness
would make her want to be kind.

He saw her face lifted for that second good-by kiss--and quickened his
speed. He hoped he would not have to be long at the hospital, hoped Amy
would not be asleep when he got back home. He lingered happily around
the thought of there being a home to go back to, of how Amy would be
there when he got back.

But it was at a slower speed that, an hour later, he traveled those same
streets. He had lost his patient. It was no failure of the operator, but
one of those cases where the particular human body is not equal to the
demand made upon it, where there was no reaction. He got no satisfaction
in telling himself that the woman could not have lived long without the
operation; she had not lived with it--that was the only side it turned
to him. The surgery was all right enough, but life had ebbed away. It
brought a sense of who was master.

He had been practising for twelve years, but death always cut deep into
his spirit. It was more than chagrin, more than the disheartenment of
the workman at failure, when he lost a patient. It was a real sense of
death, and with that a feeling of man's final powerlessness.

That made it a different town through which he drove upon his return; a
town where people cut their way ruthlessly through life--and to what
end? They might be a little kinder to each other along the way, it would
seem, when this was what it came to for them all. They were kind enough
about death--not so kind about the mean twists in life.

That feeling was all wrapped up with Ruth Holland; it brought Ruth to
him. He thought of the many times they had traveled that road together,
times when he would take her where she could meet Stuart Williams, then
pick her up again and bring her home, her family thinking she had been
with him. How would he ever make Amy understand about that? It seemed
now that it could not be done, that it would be something they did not
share, perhaps something lying hostilely between them. He wondered why
it had not seemed to him the shameful thing it would appear to anyone he
told of it. Was that something twisted in him, or was it just that utter
difference between knowing things from within and judging from without?
To himself, it was never in the form of argument he defended Ruth. It
was the