“How soon you find these things out!” I cried to Hilda, a few minutes later.  “A mere man would never have thought of that.  And who is Arthur?”

“A sailor—­on a ship that trades with the South Seas.  I hope he is worthy of her.  Fretting over Arthur’s absence has aggravated the case.  He is homeward-bound now.  She is worrying herself to death for fear she should not live to say good-bye to him.”

“She will live to marry him,” I answered, with confidence like her own, “if you say she can stand it.”

“The lethodyne—­oh, yes; that’s all right.  But the operation itself is so extremely dangerous; though Dr. Sebastian says he has called in the best surgeon in London for all such cases.  They are rare, he tells me—­and Nielsen has performed on six, three of them successfully.”

We gave the girl the drug.  She took it, trembling, and went off at once, holding Hilda’s hand, with a pale smile on her face, which persisted there somewhat weirdly all through the operation.  The work of removing the growth was long and ghastly, even for us who were well seasoned to such sights; but at the end Nielsen expressed himself as perfectly satisfied.  “A very neat piece of work!” Sebastian exclaimed, looking on.  “I congratulate you, Nielsen.  I never saw anything done cleaner or better.”

“A successful operation, certainly!” the great surgeon admitted, with just pride in the Master’s commendation.

“And the patient?” Hilda asked, wavering.

“Oh, the patient?  The patient will die,” Nielsen replied, in an unconcerned voice, wiping his spotless instruments.

“That is not my idea of the medical art,” I cried, shocked at his callousness.  “An operation is only successful if—­”

He regarded me with lofty scorn.  “A certain percentage of losses,” he interrupted, calmly, “is inevitable, of course, in all surgical operations.  We are obliged to average it.  How could I preserve my precision and accuracy of hand if I were always bothered by sentimental considerations of the patient’s safety?”

Hilda Wade looked up at me with a sympathetic glance.  “We will pull her through yet,” she murmured, in her soft voice, “if care and skill can do it,—­my care and your skill.  This is now our patient, Dr. Cumberledge.”

It needed care and skill.  We watched her for hours, and she showed no sign or gleam of recovery.  Her sleep was deeper than either Sebastian’s or Hilda’s had been.  She had taken a big dose, so as to secure immobility.  The question now was, would she recover at all from it?  Hour after hour we waited and watched; and not a sign of movement!  Only the same deep, slow, hampered breathing, the same feeble, jerky pulse, the same deathly pallor on the dark cheeks, the same corpse-like rigidity of limb and muscle.

At last our patient stirred faintly, as in a dream; her breath faltered.  We bent over her.  Was it death, or was she beginning to recover?