eptionally imaginative and vivid
temperament, seemed able to endure it. Sebastian was discouraged. He
saw the anaesthetic was not destined to fulfil his first enthusiastic
humanitarian expectations. One day, while the investigation was just at
this stage, a case was admitted into the observation-cots in which Hilda
Wade took a particular interest. The patient was a young girl
named Isabel Huntley--tall, dark, and slender, a markedly quick
and imaginative type, with large black eyes which clearly bespoke a
passionate nature. Though distinctly hysterical, she was pretty and
pleasing. Her rich dark hair was as copious as it was beautiful. She
held herself erect and had a finely poised head. From the first moment
she arrived, I could see nurse Wade was strongly drawn towards her.
Their souls sympathised. Number Fourteen--that is our impersonal way of
describing CASES--was constantly on Hilda's lips. "I like the girl," she
said once. "She is a lady in fibre."

"And a tobacco-trimmer by trade," Sebastian added, sarcastically.

As usual, Hilda's was the truer description. It went deeper.

Number Fourteen's ailment was a rare and peculiar one, into which I need
not enter here with professional precision. (I have described the case
fully for my brother practitioners in my paper in the fourth volume
of Sebastian's Medical Miscellanies.) It will be enough for my present
purpose to say, in brief, that the lesion consisted of an internal
growth which is always dangerous and most often fatal, but which
nevertheless is of such a character that, if it be once happily
eradicated by supremely good surgery, it never tends to recur, and
leaves the patient as strong and well as ever. Sebastian was, of course,
delighted with the splendid opportunity thus afforded him. "It is a
beautiful case!" he cried, with professional enthusiasm. "Beautiful!
Beautiful! I never saw one so deadly or so malignant before. We are
indeed in luck's way. Only a miracle can save her life. Cumberledge, we
must proceed to perform the miracle."

Sebastian loved such cases. They formed his ideal. He did not greatly
admire the artificial prolongation of diseased and unwholesome lives,
which could never be of much use to their owners or anyone else; but
when a chance occurred for restoring to perfect health a valuable
existence which might otherwise, be extinguished before its time, he
positively revelled in his beneficent calling. "What nobler object can
a man prop