The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was a stranger to them. In his relations with women he was singularly impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam stir in him. The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged. It was not the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman he wanted to marry. Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life and be sure of healing. To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority and knowledge—that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such confidence in him.
She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment, he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures. She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes, and she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there. For an instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being, the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence. It was the emergence of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never married and had never dallied! But in a moment it was gone again—driven away.
“What a wicked little flirt you are!” he said, with a shake of the head. “You’ll come to a bad end, if you don’t change your ways.”
“Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what’s the matter with me,” she retorted. “Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on another, and then there’s a lot of thinking to be done.”
The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. “If you were going to operate on me, what would it be for?” she asked more flippantly than her face showed.
“Well, it’s obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike for the cancer love,” he answered, with a direct look.
She flushed and changed on the instant. “Is love a cancer?” she asked. All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very like anger quickened in her.
“Unrequited love is,” he answered deliberately. “How do you know it is unrequited?” she asked sharply.
“Well, I don’t know it,” he answered, dismayed by the look in her face. “But I certainly hope I’m right. I do, indeed.”
“And if you were right, what would you do—as a surgeon?” she questioned, with an undertone of meaning.