With a stifled sob the poor little fellow suddenly managed to raise himself from the table on which he was stretched. He looked round wildly on the circle of men's faces, controlled and expectant, with a certain every-day expression in anticipation of what, in its blind terror and life and death importance to him, was a familiar occurrence to them, and on the one woman's face, controlled too, but with an indescribable wistfulness under the control. Then he made his childish appeal, shrill with misery, "Oh, gentlemen, will you not stop till I say my prayers?" There was an instant pause of surprise, commiseration, constraint--the peculiar awkwardness which in Englishmen waits on any provocation to betray feeling. Nobody liked to look at his neighbour to see how he looked, lest there should be the most distant sign of emotion in his own face. Some strong men there had ceased to pray or to believe in prayer, yet all were more or less touched by the lad's implicit faith. As for Annie she had been praying at that very moment, praying fervently in the silence of her heart, that she might be saved from breaking down and allowed to be of some service to the boy. "Certainly, certainly, my little chap; but you must be quick about it," said the great surgeon a little hoarsely. "Our-Father-which-art-in-Heaven," began the boy, running the words together and speaking with a parrot-like monotony in an unnaturally high-pitched key. Then his voice began to quaver a little till he stopped short with a cry of despair--"I cannot mind the words, I cannot say my prayers. Oh! will nobody say them for me? If mother, as is not in Lon'on, were here, she would do it fast," he ended, flinging out one thin arm and clutching convulsively at the air in a kind of panic-stricken terror. There was another second's dead silence. It was broken by a woman's voice. Annie had taken a step forward close to the boy's elbow, so that her voice was in his ear. She could not kneel, but instinctively she clasped her hands and bent her head reverently as she said in low but clear tones which were carried throughout the length and breadth of the room, and thrilled in every ear, the Lord's Prayer. At its close she went on without hesitation in the same wonderfully audible voice: "God bless this little boy. Forgive him every wrong he has ever done. Keep him safe, and raise him up again, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen." Another voice--a deeper one--responded to the "Amen." It was said by the famous operator's enemies that he was lax in his religious opinions, and that he rarely found time to go to church. Nevertheless it was he who with grave heartiness repeated the Amen.