Then Bettina asked, "How did you know?"
"Everybody knows," Sara said, hysterically. "Did you think you could hide it?"
Doris was weeping, too, in Bobbie's arms, and Bobbie's white, set face showed what he was feeling for his friend. "Oh, what made him go out on such a day—of all the crazy things——"
"I told him not to," said Captain Stubbs, who had kept hitherto in the background, "but there's no fool like a young fool, and I said it at the time. But it was God's own providence that we were there when he fell. And if any one can fix him up it's Anthony."
Bettina heard, and thought of her former fear of this place, which seemed now a sacred house of healing. Was she the same girl who had railed so bitterly against Anthony's profession? She felt that she wanted to tell him how great he was. Why, he was a wonderful man—and he was going to save Justin as he had saved others. Daily he fought battles with death and conquered. He must conquer now!
Up-stairs in the operating room was being played a game of skill which had for its pawns human life and human reason.
The worst trouble lay in the wounds about the head. But there were other dreadful complications, and many times in the hours that followed it seemed that the game was lost.
All through the tiresome ordeal not once did a muscle of the great surgeon quiver. Not once did he show dismay at that which was most baffling; not once did he show weakness at that which was most pitiful.
But when at last his great task was ended, his face was worn and gray.
Yet as he went to change his clothes, through the fabric of his weariness and of his anxiety ran a thread of joy in the thought that the barriers were down between himself and Diana, and that he might love her now without reproach.