street with its heavy traffic.  Contrary to expectation, the tumour lay deep, extending between the large nerve bundles and blood vessels in the inner portion of the brachial plexus.  It had to be removed with a scalpel, a very ticklish operation because of the proximity to the thin-walled great vein, which at the least incision sucks in air and produces instant death.  But everything went well.  The large hollow wound was stuffed with antiseptic gauze, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour the farmer, with the help of his son, was carried unconscious into a hospital room on the other side of the hall and laid in bed.

Immediately after the operation, Frederick said he would have to telegraph to Miss Burns, who intended to visit him the next day, telling her not to come.  But the words were scarcely out of his mouth, when a boy brought a cable message from Europe for him.  He opened it, said not a word, and asked the farmer’s son to drive him straight back home.  He shook hands with his friends and took leave without referring to the contents of the message.

The drive in the sleigh beside the farmer’s son through the snowy landscape was very different from the drive he had taken with Peter on his arrival two weeks before.  This time he himself was not driving; what was worse was the absence of the earlier feeling that he had regained mastery over himself and renewed joy in life.  He feared his last moment had come.  The country he was in, the place he was driving to, the fact that he was sitting in a sleigh, these things he realised only intermittently.  Though the sun was shining in a cloudless sky upon a dazzling white earth, he felt for minutes at a time that he was being drawn forward into utter darkness to the accompaniment of sleigh-bells.  The farmer boy noticed nothing, except that the famous German physician was taciturn and extremely pale.

Frederick had never been in greater need of all his will power.  But for his iron self-control, he would have gone stark mad and jumped with a shout from the sleigh dashing along at full speed.  He knew a telegram was lying crumpled in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat; but each time he tried to recall what was in the telegram, it seemed that a hammer kept knocking at his head, dulling his senses.  The grateful country boy had no inkling that close beside him was sitting a man who had to exert superhuman strength not to succumb to an attack of raving madness.  As a matter of fact, the boy was in danger of a maniac’s clutching him by the throat and drawing him into a life and death struggle.

At his door Frederick shook hands with the farmer’s son and groped his way into the house through midnight darkness.  The boy’s few words of thanks went down in a rushing and roaring of vast black waters.  The sleigh-bells began to jingle again and never ceased, turning into that infernal ringing that had become firmly fixed in Frederick’s head since the shipwreck.