and the Enemy—­watching for every chance, intent for every momentarily opened chink or cranny wherein he could thrust his lean fingers—­entered the frail tenement with a leap, a rushing, headlong spring that jarred the house of life to its foundations.  Lowering close over her head Lloyd felt the shadow of his approach.  He had arrived there in that commonplace little room, with its commonplace accessories, its ornaments, that suddenly seemed so trivial, so impertinent—­the stopped French clock, with its simpering, gilded cupids, on the mantelpiece; the photograph of a number of picnickers “grouped” on a hotel piazza gazing with monolithic cheerfulness at this grim business, this struggle of the two world forces, this crisis in a life.

Then abruptly the operation was over.

The nurse and surgeons eased their positions immediately, drawing long breaths.  They began to talk, commenting upon the operation, and Lloyd, intensely interested, asked Street why he had, contrary to her expectations, removed the bone above the lesser trochanter.  He smiled, delighted at her intelligence.

“It’s better than cutting through the neck, Miss Searight,” he told her.  “If I had gone through the neck, don’t you see, the trochanter major would come over the hole and prevent the discharges.”

“Yes, yes, I see, of course,” assented Lloyd.

The incision was sewn up, and when all was over Lloyd carried Hattie back to the bed in the next room.  Slowly the little girl regained consciousness, and Lloyd began to regard her once more as a human being.  During the operation she had forgotten the very existence of Hattie Campbell, a little girl she knew.  She had only seen a bit of mechanism out of order and in the hands of a repairer.  It was always so with Lloyd.  Her charges were not infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the “case,” only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in imminent danger of running down.

But the danger was by no means over.  The operation had been near the trunk.  There had been considerable loss of blood, and the child’s power of resistance had been weakened by long periods of suffering.  Lloyd feared that the shock might prove too great.  Farnham departed, but for a little while the surgeon remained with Lloyd to watch the symptoms.  At length, however, he too, pressed for time, and expected at one of the larger hospitals of the City, went away, leaving directions for Lloyd to telephone him in case of the slightest change.  At this hour, late in the afternoon, there were no indications that the little girl would not recover from the shock.  Street believed she would rally and ultimately regain her health.

“But,” he told Lloyd as he bade her good-bye, “I don’t need to impress upon you the need of care and the greatest vigilance; absolute rest is the only thing; she must see nobody, not even her father.  The whole system is numbed and deadened just yet, but there will be a change either for better or worse some time to-night.”