The storm of his passions quieted down.  That one sentence just expressed to him the debt he owed to her.  In return—­well, he could do no less than leave her her illusion.

“Good-bye,” he said.  “All the good that comes to us, somehow, seems to spring from women like yourself, while we give you nothing but trouble in return.  Even this last misery, which my selfishness has brought to you, lifts me to breathe a cleaner air.”

“He must have forgotten to post it,” Mrs. Branscome pleaded.

“Yes; we must believe that.  Good-bye!”

For a moment he stayed to watch her white figure, outlined against the dusk of the room, and then gently closed the door on her.  The next morning David left England, not, however, for Grindelwald.  He dreaded the morbid selfishness which grows from isolation, and sought a finishing school in the companionship of practical men.

THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.

The surgeon has a weakness for men who make their living on the sea.  From the skipper of a Dogger Bank fishing-smack to the stoker of a Cardiff tramp, from Margate ’longshoreman to a crabber of the Stilly Isles, he embraces them all in a lusty affection.  And this not merely out of his own love of salt water but because his diagnosis reveals the gentleman in them more surely than in the general run of his wealthier patients.  “A primitive gentleman, if you like,” Lincott will say, “not above tearing his meat with his fingers or wearing the same shirt night and day for a couple of months on end, but still a gentleman.”  As one of the innumerable instances which had built up his conviction, Lincott will offer you the twenty-kroner story.

As he was walking through the wards of his hospital he stopped for a moment by the bed of a brewer’s drayman who was suffering from an access of delirium tremens.  The drayman’s language was violent and voluble.  But he sank into a coma with the usual suddenness common to such cases, and in the pause which followed Lincott heard a gentle voice a few beds away earnestly apologising to a nurse for the trouble she was put to.  “Why,” she replied with a laugh, “I am here to be troubled.”  Apologies of the kind are not so frequently heard in the wards of an East End hospital.  This one, besides, was spoken with an accent not very pronounced, it is true, but unfamiliar.  Lincott moved down to the bed.  It was occupied by a man apparently tall, with a pair of remorseful blue eyes set in an open face, and a thatch of yellow hair dusted with grey.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lincott, and the patient explained.  He was a Norseman from Finland, fifty-three years old, and he had worked all his life on English ships.  He had risen from “decky” to mate.  Then he had injured himself, and since he could work no more he had come into the hospital to be cured.  Lincott examined him, found that a slight operation was all the man needed, and performed it himself.  In six weeks time Helling, as the sailor was named, was discharged.  He made a simple and dignified little speech of thanks to the nurses for their attention, and another to the surgeon for saving his life.