Number Fourteen’s ailment was a rare and peculiar one, into which I need not enter here with professional precision. (I have described the case fully for my brother practitioners in my paper in the fourth volume of Sebastian’s Medical Miscellanies.) It will be enough for my present purpose to say, in brief, that the lesion consisted of an internal growth which is always dangerous and most often fatal, but which nevertheless is of such a character that, if it be once happily eradicated by supremely good surgery, it never tends to recur, and leaves the patient as strong and well as ever.  Sebastian was, of course, delighted with the splendid opportunity thus afforded him.  “It is a beautiful case!” he cried, with professional enthusiasm.  “Beautiful!  Beautiful!  I never saw one so deadly or so malignant before.  We are indeed in luck’s way.  Only a miracle can save her life.  Cumberledge, we must proceed to perform the miracle.”

Sebastian loved such cases.  They formed his ideal.  He did not greatly admire the artificial prolongation of diseased and unwholesome lives, which could never be of much use to their owners or anyone else; but when a chance occurred for restoring to perfect health a valuable existence which might otherwise, be extinguished before its time, he positively revelled in his beneficent calling.  “What nobler object can a man propose to himself,” he used to say, “than to raise good men and true from the dead, as it were, and return them whole and sound to the family that depends upon them?  Why, I had fifty times rather cure an honest coal-heaver of a wound in his leg than give ten years more lease of life to a gouty lord, diseased from top to toe, who expects to find a month of Carlsbad or Homburg once every year make up for eleven months of over-eating, over-drinking, vulgar debauchery, and under-thinking.”  He had no sympathy with men who lived the lives of swine:  his heart was with the workers.

Of course, Hilda Wade soon suggested that, as an operation was absolutely necessary, Number Fourteen would be a splendid subject on whom to test once more the effects of lethodyne.  Sebastian, with his head on one side, surveying the patient, promptly coincided.  “Nervous diathesis,” he observed.  “Very vivid fancy.  Twitches her hands the right way.  Quick pulse, rapid perceptions, no meaningless unrest, but deep vitality.  I don’t doubt she’ll stand it.”

We explained to Number Fourteen the gravity of the case, and also the tentative character of the operation under lethodyne.  At first, she shrank from taking it.  “No, no!” she said; “let me die quietly.”  But Hilda, like the Angel of Mercy that she was, whispered in the girl’s ear:  “If it succeeds, you will get quite well, and—­you can marry Arthur.”

The patient’s dark face flushed crimson.

“Ah!  Arthur,” she cried.  “Dear Arthur!  I can bear anything you choose to do to me—­for Arthur!”