It bit deep, as he had known it would.  If he had struck a knife into his friend’s heart he could not have caused so sharp a hurt.  Leaver turned white under this surgery of speech, and for an instant he looked as if he would have sprung at Burns’s throat.  There followed sixty silent seconds while both men stood like statues.  But the merciless judgment had turned the scale.  With a control of himself which struck Burns, as he recalled it afterward, as marvellous, Leaver answered evenly:  “You shall not have the chance to say that again.  I will operate when you think best.”

“Thank God!” said Red Pepper Burns, under his breath.

The two walked out of the little white room, with its austere and absolute cleanliness, without another word concerning that which was to come.  Burns took his friend over the house, and Leaver looked into room after room, approving, commending, even suggesting, quite as if nothing had happened.  And yet, after all, not quite as if nothing had happened.  He was not the same man who had come out to Sunny Farm an hour before.  Burns knew, as well as if he could have seen into Leaver’s mind, the conflict that was going on there.  The thing was settled, he would not retreat, yet there was still a fight to be fought—­the biggest fight of his life.  On its issue was to depend the success or failure of the coming test.  Burns’s warm heart would have led him to speak sympathetically and encouragingly of the issue to be met; his understanding of the crisis it precipitated kept him mute.  Whatever help he was now to give his friend must be given, not through speech but through silence, and by that subtler means of communication between spirit and spirit which cannot be analyzed or understood, but which may be more real than anything in life.

They went downstairs, presently, and rejoined the party.  Miss Ruston and Miss Mathewson, Mr. James Macauley and his son Tom, with Bobby Burns, were engaged in a spirited game of “puss in a corner,” for the benefit of Patsy Kelly, who lay looking on from his chair with sparkling, excited eyes.  Beside Jamie Ferguson, who could not see, Mrs. Burns sat, describing to him the game and interpreting the shouts of laughter which reached his ears as he lay, too flat upon his back to see what was happening twenty feet away.

Ellen looked up, as her husband approached, and something in his face made her regard him intently.  He smiled at her, his hazel eyes dark as they often were when something had stirred him deeply, and she guessed enough of the meaning of this aspect to keep her from looking at Dr. Leaver until he had been for some time upon the porch.

When she did observe him, he was standing, leaning against a pillar and looking at the wan little face below her, from a point at which Jamie could not know of his scrutiny.  His back was turned upon the game upon the grass, though the others were watching it.  When it ended Burns called Charlotte Ruston to the taking of the photographs he wanted—­snapshots of the two little patients carried into the full sunlight.  This being quickly accomplished, he announced his own immediate departure.