The operator turned away; he stood in his butcher's blouse and stared through out of the laboratory window, over the head of the lily, which regarded him fixedly. The students grew rapidly quiet. When the professor took Loveliness into his arms, and the Yorkshire, still crying like a human child that had been lost and saved, put up his weak paws around his master's neck and tried to kiss the tears that fell, unashamed, down the cheeks of that eminent man, the lecture room burst into a storm of applause; then fell suddenly still again, as if it felt embarrassed both by its expression and by its silence, and knew not what to do.
"Has the knife touched him—anywhere?" asked the professor, choking.
"No, thank God!" replied the demonstrator, turning around timidly; "and I assure you—our regrets—such a mistake"—
"That will do, doctor," said the professor. "Gentlemen, let me pass, if you please. I have no time to lose. There is one waiting for this little creature who"—
He did not finish his sentence, but went out from among them. As he passed with the shorn and quivering dog in his arms, the students rose to their feet.
He stopped the cab a hundred feet away, went across a neighbor's lot, and got into the house by the back door, with the Yorkshire hidden under his coat. The doctor's buggy stood at the curbstone in front. The little girl was so weak that morning—what might not have happened?
The father felt, with a sudden sickness of heart, that time had hardly converged more closely with fate in the operating room than it was narrowing in his own home. The cook shrieked when she saw him come into the kitchen with the half-hidden burden in his arms; and Kathleen ran in, panting.
"Call the doctor," he commanded hoarsely, "and ask him what we shall do."
All the stories that he had ever read about joy that killed blazed through his brain. He dared neither advance nor retreat, but stood in the middle of the kitchen, stupidly. Then he saw that the quick wit of Kathleen had got ahead of him; for she was on her knees arranging the crimson blankets in the empty basket. Between the three, they gently laid the emaciated and disfigured dog into his own bed. Nora cried into the milk she was warming for the little thing. And the doctor came in while Loveliness feebly drank.