‘Impossible!’ Geoffrey disencouraged her promptly. ‘Orthodoxy cannot be learnt at a moment’s notice. You must be content to be--yourself! And that is much,’ he added, watching her beautiful, earnest face. ‘Your sermon may well be a silent one. Look, just as you are looking at this moment, and leave the rest to the patient’s human nature. Jack may be a miserable sinner, needing homilies. That is a fact you and I have no certitude about. We know that he is a poor lad, far from his people, laid low in pain and weakness. Depend upon it, the sound of a tender voice, the sight of Dinah Arbuthnot’s face, must prove good medicine, both for his soul and body.’ The tears started to Dinah’s eyes. She was just at that tension point of suppressed emotion when a kindly accent, a word or two of praise, are as hands extended to a drowning man. If Gaston only esteemed her poor personal gifts as Geoffrey did--for, of whatever she thought, to-day, Gaston still was beneath the current of her thinking! Nay (this followed by a descending, yet inevitable sequence of ideas), if Gaston could only hold the opinion of her held--Dinah, remembering events, had a little thrill of shame--by a man like Lord Rex Basire! Perhaps the sum-total of yoked infelicity might be lessened if careless husbands would reckon with themselves, sometimes, concerning the number of their deserved rivals--such husbands, I mean, as possess wives of Dinah Arbuthnot’s mould. For must not the answer be trumpet-tongued: ‘The whole seeing world!’ Does not every man, save the purblind, range himself by intuition on the side of a young and beautiful and neglected woman? But careless husbands may not have imagination enough for such a stretch, or there may be sympathisers ... outside feminine judges ... mature sirens ... a clever whisper, even, now and then. And so the wife’s heart continues to ache to the last--or gives up aching of a sudden: deeper tragedy, by far. Dinah’s colour went and came as she traversed the corridors of the hospital beside Geoffrey. The moment they entered Ward A., the men’s accident room, she forgot her want of knowledge, of orthodoxy. ‘Explanation’ was not needed here. She saw only the rows of beds, each bed with its pallid inmate. She felt only that she was Dinah Thurston--among the poor, the simple, the suffering,--among her equals.