e--a beautiful case. As the problem
developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his
faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract
scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his
professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his
hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had
befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of
health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough--it was, as Justine
knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom
sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice
and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save
Bessy's life--a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the
scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the
youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat
which his elders deemed impossible.

As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed
for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her
hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies
of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a
case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough--in the first
place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till
her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that
faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them
believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The
evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at
great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial
symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased
her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it
seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless
efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt
and audacious use of stimulants--by a rapid marshalling of resources, a
display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but
admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts--the spark of life had
been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.

"Yes--I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever," Wyant
exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning
toward Justine across the table on wh