been her playmate all her life; the doctor, all alone and friendless in a small, remote village, had found in her an intelligent listener, and had talked quite impersonally to her, as a safety-valve for his own loneliness.  To them all she had been just a girl in certain circumstances; her circumstances and not herself had really been the thing that impressed them; she was just someone who happened to be there.  But to Louis she was obviously a very tangible, defined person.  She could not forget the wonder of that.

And Louis, flattered by her admiration, her wonderment, fell into a very human sort of weakness; he tried to make himself even more interesting; with the same quite amiable weakness that makes the witness of a street accident spill more blood, bear more pain in the telling than the victim could possibly have done, he began to lie to her.  She was so easy to lie to.  He scarcely realized, at first, that he was lying; a description of an operation he had witnessed, as a student, with Sir Horsley Winans playing the chief part, had won her horrified, shivering admiration; ten minutes later he was describing how he himself had done trephining (which he was careful to assure her was the most difficult operation possible) on an injured dock labourer; how the patient had wakened from the anesthetic in the middle of it; how Louis had immediately dropped his instruments and gone on administering the anesthetic because the anesthetist was actually flirting with a nurse who was Louis’s pet annoyance in the wards; how the electric light had failed at the crucial moment; how only Louis’s iron nerve had prevented tragedy and horror.

“You may think, seeing me such a bundle of nerves as I am now, that I couldn’t have done it,” he said.  “But when I’m doing the doctor job I’m a different being; I lose myself.  I just gave him another whiff of A.C.E., called to the nurses to fetch candles and got on with it.  He’s walking about London to-day—­as right as nine-pence.”

She knew nothing about hospitals, had never seen one in her life; he called most things by their bewildering technical names and she listened respectfully as a layman will always listen to technicalities.  She did not know that the whole thing was a fabrication; in spite of his warning about his lying she had naturally thought that, if he should lie to her at all it would be about drinking and not about everyday affairs.  And he, carried away by his imagination and his desire to impress her, scarcely realized what he was doing.

Marcella was very bad for him; her courteous belief in him encouraged him to deceive her; he thought she was rather silly; any other girl would have chaffed him, have capped his tales by others, obviously “tall” as Violet had done until he had sickened her entirely; but to Marcella’s Keltic imagination there was nothing incredible in his gory, gorgeous exploits; was not she, herself, the daughter of a faraway spaewife who could slide down moonbeams and ride on the breasts