Dr. Needzak walked softly to the door that led to the reception room. He drew noiselessly a bolt across the jamb, locking it. Then he pointed to another door, telling the girl: "Go in there and undress. I'll be ready for you in a moment." He whistled softly under his breath, as he pulled instruments and jars of colored substances from the deepest recesses of a cupboard. The girl already lay calmly on a metal table in the inner room when Dr. Needzak entered. He staggered a trifle under a precariously balanced pile of equipment in his arms. He explained: "I should let the receptionist do the hard work like this. But I don't let her snoop around in this private room." "Will you really need all those things?" the girl asked, uncertainly. "I thought that you just snip out a tiny specimen with a little gadget, to make a diagnosis." "I could probably get along with just that one gadget," the doctor said. He pulled a mask from a drawer and snapped on the sterilite. "But I'm an old boy scout at heart. Always prepared." Unexpectedly, he plopped the mask squarely over the girl's face. Her cry was almost inaudible, as the thick gauze clamped itself over her mouth, clung tightly beneath the jaw. Dr. Needzak pinioned her shoulders to the table, while her legs kicked wildly for a few seconds. The anesthetic stopped the kicking within five seconds. He waited for a count of ten, before he wrenched the mask free. Turning up the sterilite to full strength, Dr. Needzak began to line up surgical instruments in a neat row, humming under his breath. * * * * * Fifteen minutes later, the physician made a pair of injections into the girl's upper arm. Then he swished oxygen into her face until she recovered consciousness. "Wonderful stuff, this new anesthetic," he told her placidly. "It works fast, wears off just as fast, doesn't leave the patient retching. Now, you can sit up slowly. If you don't try anything strenuous for the next day or two, you'll never know that you've had an operation." Miss Tillett's eyes widened. "Operation! I came here for a diagnosis. I didn't authorize--" "I'm sorry. I operated without your consent. But I had a good reason. It wasn't even a benign tumor that you had. It was only a cyst. If I had merely diagnosed, and told you the truth, you would have kept clinging to the hope that it might be a malign tumor. You wouldn't have let me take it out. It would have grown big enough to disfigure you, not big enough to cause you any physical damage. You would have gone through the years with a new trouble, that of deformity, and you might have been mentally warped in the delusion that you had a fatal disease. You're as sound as a rock." Something inside the girl seemed to turn into liquid. She sat with slumped shoulders, arms dangling limply at her side, and head sunk so far that her chin rested against her chest.