“You ’urt,” she muttered.  But her eyes were still amused.

“A great many people get hurt here,” he said contemptuously, “and don’t whine about it.”

2

Ten minutes later they sat opposite each other by his table.  She was coughing and laughing and wiping her eyes.

“C’est abominable,” she gasped, “abominable!”

He waited.  He could afford to wait.  He had the feeling of being carried on the breast of a deep, quiet sea.  He could take his time.  Her laughter and damnable light-heartedness no longer fretted and exasperated him.  Rather it was a kind of bitter spice—­a tense screwing up of his exquisite sense of calm power.  She was like a tigress sprawling in the sunshine, not knowing that its heart is already covered by a rifle.  He prolonged the moment deliberately, savouring it.  In that deliberation the woman in the hospital, Francey Wilmot, Cosgrave, and a host of faceless men who had gone under this woman’s chariot wheels played their devious, sinister parts.  They goaded him on and justified him.  He became in his own eyes the figure of the Law, pronouncing sentence, weightily, without heat or passion or pity.

“You do it on purpose,” she said, “you make me cough.”

He arranged his papers with precise hands.

“I’m sorry—­I know you came here as a joke.  It isn’t—­not for you.  It’s serious.”  He saw her smile, and though he went on speaking in the same quiet, methodical tone, he felt that he had suddenly lost control of himself.  “Medical science isn’t an exact science.  Doctors are never sure of anything until it has happened.  But speaking with that reservation I have to tell you that your case is hopeless—­that you have three—­at the most four months——­”

She had interrupted with a laugh, but the laugh itself had broken in half.  She had read his face.  After a long interval she asked a question—­one word—­almost inaudibly—­and he nodded.

“If you had come earlier one might have operated,” he said.  “But even so, it would have been doubtful.”

Already many men and women had received their final sentence here in this room, and each had met it in his own way.  The women were the quietest.  Perhaps their lives had taught them to endure the hideous indignity of a well-ordered death-bed without that galling sense of physical humiliation which tormented men.  For the most part they became immersed in practical issues—­how the news was to be broken to others, who would look after the house and the children, and how the last scene might be acted with the least possible inconvenience and distress for those who would have to witness it.  Some men had raved and stormed and pleaded, as though he had been a judge whose judgment might be revoked:  “Not me—­others—­not me—­not to-day—­years hence.”  They had paced his private room for hours, trying to get a hold over themselves, devastated with shame and horror at the breakdown of their confident personalities.  Some had risen to an impregnable dignity, finer than their lives.  One or two had laughed.