"Quite right, but something else besides a man. A man with a name. Tell me the name, or shall I tell it you?"
She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but there was no terror of him in them now.
"My name is Saxham—Owen Saxham. Say the name after me."
For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath of surprise, but her subdued exclamation was silenced in mid-utterance by Saxham's look.
"Dr. Owen Saxham—Doctor because I try to cure sick people. You have seen me trying at the hospitals. You have helped me many times——"
She puckered her delicate, bewildered brows, and held her head on one side. To be made to think, and recall, and remember, hurt.
"—Many times, and the sick people were grateful. They often ask me now, How is Miss Mildare?"
Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on the Doctor's khâki coat. She was trying to count them, it seemed, by the movement of her lips. Saxham went on with inexorable patience:
"Never mind the buttons. Look at me. Think of the patients at the Hospital who are asking when Lynette Mildare is coming back again. Tell me what I am to say to them, Lynette?"
His voice shook over the beloved name. In spite of his grim effort to fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes brimmed over, and a drop splashed, hot and heavy, upon the wandering hand that crept out to finger the buttons that would not let themselves be counted right. She looked up at the eyes that wept for her, and their mingled love and anguish touched even her dulled mind to pity. She held her slender hand up against the light, and looked at the splash of wet upon it.