He left the room.  They lingered; looking again at their canvases, understanding their own work as they had not hitherto and more strongly than ever drawn toward their model whom that day they missed.  Slowly and with disappointment and with many conjectures as to why she had not come, they separated.

V

It was Sunday.  All round St. Luke’s Hospital quiet reigned.  The day was very still up there on the heights under the blue curtain of the sky.

When he had been hurled against the curb on the dark street, had been rolled over and tossed there and left there with no outcry, no movement, as limp and senseless as a mangled weed, the careless crowd which somewhere in the city every day gathers about such scenes quickly gathered about him.  In this throng was the physician whose car stood near by; and he, used to sights of suffering but touched by that tragedy of unconscious child and half-crazed mother, had hurried them in his own car to St. Luke’s—­to St. Luke’s, which is always open, always ready, and always free to those who lack means.

Just before they stopped at the entrance she had pleaded in the doctor’s ear for a luxury.

“To the private ward,” he said to those who lifted the lad to the stretcher, speaking as though in response to her entreaty.

“One of the best rooms,” he said before the operation, speaking as though he shouldered the responsibility of the further expense.  “And a room for her near by,” he added.  “Everything for them!  Everything!”

* * * * *

So there he was now, the lad, or what there was left of him, this quiet Sunday, in a pleasant room opposite the cathedral.  The air was like early summer.  The windows were open.  He lay on his back, not seeing anything.  The skin of his forehead had been torn off; there was a bandage over his eyes.  And there were bruises on his body and bruises on his face, which was horribly disfigured.  The lips were swollen two or three thicknesses; it was agony for him to speak.  When he realized what had happened, after the operation, his first mumbled words to her were: 

“They will never have me now.”

About the middle of the forenoon of this still Sunday morning, when the doctor left, she followed him into the hall as usual, and questioned him as usual with her eyes.  He encouraged her and encouraged himself: 

“I believe he is going to get well.  He has the will to get well, he has the bravery to get well.  He is brave about it; he is as brave as he can be.”

“Of course he is brave,” she said scornfully.  “Of course he is brave.”

“The love of such a mother would call him back to life,” he added, and he laid one of his hands on her head for a moment.

“Don’t do that,” she said, as though the least tenderness toward herself at such a moment would unnerve her, melt away all her fortitude.