By a shifting of the group around the bed, K.'s eyes looked for a moment directly into Carlotta's. Just for a moment; then the crowd closed up again. It was well for Carlotta that it did. She looked as if she had seen a ghost--closed her eyes, even reeled. “Miss Harrison is worn out,” Dr. Wilson said brusquely. “Get some one to take her place.” But Carlotta rallied. After all, the presence of this man in this room at such a time meant nothing. He was Sidney's friend, that was all. But her nerve was shaken. The thing had gone beyond her. She had not meant to kill. It was the boy's weakened condition that was turning her revenge into tragedy. “I am all right,” she pleaded across the bed to the Head. “Let me stay, please. He's from my ward. I--I am responsible.” Wilson was at his wits' end. He had done everything he knew without result. The boy, rousing for an instant, would lapse again into stupor. With a healthy man they could have tried more vigorous measures--could have forced him to his feet and walked him about, could have beaten him with knotted towels dipped in ice-water. But the wrecked body on the bed could stand no such heroic treatment. It was Le Moyne, after all, who saved Johnny Rosenfeld's life. For, when staff and nurses had exhausted all their resources, he stepped forward with a quiet word that brought the internes to their feet astonished. There was a new treatment for such cases--it had been tried abroad. He looked at Max. Max had never heard of it. He threw out his hands. “Try it, for Heaven's sake,” he said. “I'm all in.” The apparatus was not in the house--must be extemporized, indeed, at last, of odds and ends from the operating-room. K. did the work, his long fingers deft and skillful--while Mrs. Rosenfeld knelt by the bed with her face buried; while Sidney sat, dazed and bewildered, on her little chair inside the door; while night nurses tiptoed along the corridor, and the night watchman stared incredulous from outside the door. When the two great rectangles that were the emergency ward windows had turned from mirrors reflecting the room to gray rectangles in the morning light; Johnny Rosenfeld opened his eyes and spoke the first words that marked his return from the dark valley. “Gee, this is the life!” he said, and smiled into K.'s watchful face. When it was clear that the boy would live, K. rose stiffly from the bedside and went over to Sidney's chair. “He's all right now,” he said--“as all right as he can be, poor lad!” “You did it--you! How strange that you should know such a thing. How am I to thank you?” The internes, talking among themselves, had wandered down to their dining-room for early coffee. Wilson was giving a few last instructions as to the boy's care. Quite unexpectedly, Sidney caught K.'s hand and held it to her lips. The iron repression of the night, of months indeed, fell away before her simple caress.