Burns held a brief conference with Miss Mathewson, who having been with him in his office and his operative work for the entire twelve years of his practice, was herself all but a surgeon and suited him better than any man, with her deft fingers and sure response to his slightest indication of intention.  The others found themselves watching the two as they came forward, cool, steady, ready for the perfect team work they had so long played.  If both hearts were beating a degree faster than usual there was nothing to show it.  Nobody knew what had passed between the two.  If they had known they might have understood why they worked so perfectly together.

“You’re going to give me your best to-day, Amy, eh?”

“You know that, Doctor Burns.”

“Of course I know it.  But I want a little better than your best.  This is one of the cases where every second is going to count.  We have to make all the speed that’s in us without a slip.  I can trust you.  I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want you thinking about it.  But I tell you now because I’ve got to have the speed.  All right; that’s all.”

He gave her one quick smile, then his face was set and stern again, as always at this moment, for it was the moment when he caught sight of his patient, quietly asleep, being brought to him.  And it was the moment when one swift echo of the prayer he had already made upon his knees leaped through his mind—­to be gone again as lightning flashes through a midnight sky.  After that there was to be no more prayer, only action.

* * * * *

The watching surgeons unconsciously held their breath as the operation began.  For the patient on the table was James Van Horn, and the man who had taken Van Horn’s life into his hands was not a great surgeon from New York or Boston, as was to have been anticipated, but their everyday colleague Burns.  And at that moment not one of them envied him his chance.

Ellen had seldom waited more anxiously for the word her husband always sent her at such times.  He fully recognized that the silent partner in crises like these suffered a very real and trying suspense, the greater that there was nothing she could do for him except to send him to his work heartened by the thought of her and of her belief in him.

It was longer than usual, on this more than ordinarily fateful morning, before Ellen received the first word from the hospital.  When it came it was from an attendant and it was not reassuring: 

“Doctor Burns wishes me to tell you that the patient has come through the operation, but is in a critical condition.  He will not leave him at present.”