“Fit or not fit, I am going.”
“But it will kill you.”
“That doesn’t signify in my case, you know.”
“Listen to me, Owen Kilgariff. You have brooded over the unfortunate circumstances of your life until you have grown morbid, particularly since this wound has been sapping your vitality. You must brace yourself up and take a healthier view of things. If you don’t, I shall make you. Here you are imagining yourself disgraced at the very time when others in high places are pressing honours upon you as the well-earned reward of your superb conduct. It is all nonsense, I tell you, and you must quit it; if not for your own sake, then for the sake of us who love you and rejoice in your splendid manhood. Your present attitude of mind is not to your credit. If you were not ill, it would be positively discreditable to you.”
“Wait a minute, Arthur. You are judging me without knowing all the facts. I’ll tell you of them after breakfast. Then, before you operate, I must talk with Evelyn about her papers. When that matter is disposed of, you shall operate without an anæthetic, and I must return to my duty on the lines.”
“Your duty there is done. You’ve already taught those fellows how to use mortars effectively. As to mere command, any other officer will attend to that as well as you could. I must operate upon your neck, and I will not do it without chloroform. Indeed, even from your own point of view, there would be nothing gained by that, for after this operation, whether done with or without an anæsthetic, you must not only lie abed for some days to come, but be so braced and harnessed that you cannot turn your head.”
Arthur then explained to his patient, as one surgeon to another, the exact nature of what it was necessary to do, and Kilgariff knew his surgery too well not to understand how imperatively necessary it would be for him to be kept perfectly still, so far as motion with his head was concerned, for a considerable period afterward.
“Very well,” Kilgariff responded. “Do as you will. But first I must arrange the matter of the papers. I’ll do that during the forenoon. Then I shall tell Dorothy the things I intended to tell you. There is no need that I shall tell you, and it will be easier to tell Dorothy.”
“As you please,” said Arthur, satisfied that he had carried his point. “Now we must go to breakfast.”
At the table, Kilgariff observed that, apart from the “coffee” made of parched rye, neither Dorothy nor Evelyn took anything but fruit. There was a cold ham on the table, and the customary loaf of hot bread, but the two women partook of neither. When Kilgariff half suggested, half asked, the reason for their abstemiousness, Dorothy replied:—