What was the value of his life, that I should ransom it by such a sacrifice?  A mean, selfish, dissipated life—­a life that would be Olivia’s curse as long as it lasted.  For an instant a vision stood out clear before me, and made my heart beat fast, of Olivia free, as she must be in the space of a few months, should I leave the disease to take its course; free and happy, disenthralled from the most galling of all bondage.  Could I not win her then?  She knew already that I loved her; would she not soon learn to love me in return?  If Olivia were living, what an irreparable injury it would be to her for this man to recover!

That seemed to settle the question.  I could not be the one to doom her to a continuation of the misery she was enduring.  It was irrational and over-scrupulous of my conscience to demand such a thing from me.  I would use all the means practised in the ordinary course of treatment to render the recovery of my patient possible, and so fulfil my duty.  I would carefully follow all Dr. Senior’s suggestions.  He was an experienced and very skilful physician; I could not do better than submit my judgment to his.

Besides, how did I know that this fancied discovery of mine was of the least value?  I had never had a chance of making experiment of it, and no doubt it was an idle chimera of my brain, when it was overwrought by anxiety for my mother’s sake.  I had not hitherto thought enough of it to ask the opinion of any of my medical friends and colleagues.  Why should I attach any importance to it now?  Let it rest.  Not a soul knew of it but myself.  I had a perfect right to keep or destroy my own notes.  Suppose I destroyed that one at once?

I unlocked the desk, and took out my book again.  The leaf on which these special notes were written was already loose, and might have been easily lost at any time, I thought.  I burned it by the flame of the gas, and threw the brown ashes into the grate.  For a few minutes I felt elated, as if set free from an oppressive burden; and I returned to the story I had been reading, and laughed more heartily than before at the grotesque turn of the incidents.  But before long the tormenting question came up again.  The notes were not lost.  They seemed now to be burned in upon my brain.

The power has been put into your hands to save life, said my conscience, and you are resolving to let it perish.  What have you to do with the fact that the nature is mean, selfish, cruel?  It is the physical life simply that you have to deal with.  What is beyond that rests in the hands of God.  What He is about to do with this soul is no question for you.  Your office pledges you to cure him if you can, and the fulfilment of this duty is required of you.  If you let this man die, you are a murderer.

But, I said in answer to myself, consider what trivial chances the whole thing has hung upon.  Besides the accident that this was my mother’s malady, there was the chance of Lowry not being called from home.  The man was his patient, not mine.  After that there was the chance of Jack going to see him, instead of me; or of him refusing my attendance.  If the chain had broken at one of these links, no responsibility could have fallen upon me.  He would have died, and all the good results of his death would have followed naturally.  Let it rest at that.