He had betrayed none, had tried, she thought—­his amazement and concern had rendered him pretty near inarticulate—­to tell her what the look in his face had already made evident even to Rush; his innocence not only of any amorous intent toward Paula but even of the possibility that any one could have interpreted the relation between them in that way.  He might have managed some such repudiation as that had she not cut across his effort with an apology for her brother.

It had been a terrible week for them all, she said.  Especially for Rush and for his Aunt Lucile, who had been here from the beginning.  Even the few hours since her own return this morning had been enough to teach her how nearly unendurable that sort of helplessness was.

It must have been in this connection that he told her what had not got round to her before, the case of his sister Sarah whom they had watched as one condemned to death until John Wollaston came and saved her.  “He simply wouldn’t be denied,” March said.  “He was all alone; even his colleagues didn’t agree with him.  And my father, having decided that she was going to die and that this must, therefore, be the will of God, didn’t think it ought to be tampered with.

“I remember your father said to him, ’Man, the will of God this morning is waiting to express itself in the skill of my hands,’ and it didn’t sound like blasphemy either.  He carried father off in his apron, just as he was, to the hospital and I went along.  I scraped an acquaintance afterward with one of the students who had been there in the theatre watching him operate and got him to tell me about it.  They felt it was a historic occasion even at the time; cheered him at the end of it.  And that sort of virtuosity does seem worthier of cheers than any scraping of horsehair over cat-gut could ever come to.  I wonder how many lives there are to-day that owe themselves altogether to him just as my sister does.—­How many children who never could have been born at all except for his skill and courage.  Because, of course, courage is half of it.”

Upon Mary the effect of this new portrait of her father was electrifying; eventually was more than that—­revolutionary.  These few words of March’s served, I think, in the troubled, turbid emotional relation she had got into with her father, as a clarifying precipitant.

But that process was slower; the immediate effect attached to March himself.  The present wonder was that it should have been he, a stranger, equipped with only the meagerest chances for observation, who, turning his straying search-light beam upon the dearest person to her in the world, should thus have illuminated him anew.  Even after he had gone it was the man rather than the things he had said that she thought about.

Amazingly, he had guessed—­she was sure she had given him no hint—­at the part Paula was playing in their domestic drama.  It had come pat upon what he had told her of the lives her father had plucked from the hand of death, the ironic, “he saved others, himself he can not save,” hanging unspoken in their thoughts.