There was a knock at the door.  Instead of calling to enter Lloyd went to it softly and opened it a few inches.  Mr. Campbell was there.

“They’ve come—­Street and the assistant.”

Lloyd heard a murmur of voices in the hall below and the closing of the front door.

Farnham and Street went at once to the operating-room to make their hands and wrists aseptic.  Campbell had gone downstairs to his smoking-room.  It had been decided—­though contrary to custom—­that Lloyd should administer the chloroform.

At length Street tapped with the handle of a scalpel on the door to say that he was ready.

“Now, dear,” said Lloyd, turning to Hattie, and picking up the ether cone.

But the little girl’s courage suddenly failed her.  She began to plead in a low voice choked with tears.  Her supplications were pitiful; but Lloyd, once more intent upon her work, every faculty and thought concentrated upon what must be done, did not temporise an instant.  Quietly she gathered Hattie’s frail wrists in the grip of one strong palm, and held the cone to her face until she had passed off with a long sigh.  She picked her up lightly, carried her into the next room, and laid her upon the operating-table.  At the last moment Lloyd had busied herself with the preparation of her own person.  Over her dress she passed her hospital blouse, which had been under a dry heat for hours.  She rolled her sleeves up from her strong white forearms with their thick wrists and fine blue veining, and for upward of ten minutes scrubbed them with a new nail-brush in water as hot as she could bear it.  After this she let her hands and forearms lie in the permanganate of potash solution till they were brown to the elbow, then washed away the stain in the oxalic-acid solution and in sterilised hot water.  Street and Farnham, wearing their sterilised gowns and gloves, took their places.  There was no conversation.  The only sounds were an occasional sigh from the patient, a direction given in a low tone, and, at intervals, the click of the knives and scalpel.  From outside the window came the persistent chirping of a band of sparrows.

Promptly the operation was begun; there was no delay, no hesitation; what there was to be done had been carefully planned beforehand, even to the minutest details.  Street, a master of his profession, thoroughly familiar with every difficulty that might present itself during the course of the work in hand, foreseeing every contingency, prepared for every emergency, calm, watchful, self-contained, set about the exsecting of the joint with no trace of compunction, no embarrassment, no misgiving.  His assistants, as well as he himself, knew that life or death hung upon the issue of the next ten minutes.  Upon Street alone devolved the life of the little girl.  A second’s hesitation at the wrong stage of the operation, a slip of bistoury or scalpel, a tremor of the wrist, a single instant’s clumsiness of the fingers,