K. made no further attempt to avoid Max Wilson. Some day they would meet face to face. He hoped, when it happened, they two might be alone; that was all. Even had he not been bound by his promise to Sidney, flight would have been foolish. The world was a small place, and, one way and another, he had known many people. Wherever he went, there would be the same chance. And he did not deceive himself. Other things being equal,--the eddy and all that it meant--, he would not willingly take himself out of his small share of Sidney's life. She was never to know what she meant to him, of course. He had scourged his heart until it no longer shone in his eyes when he looked at her. But he was very human--not at all meek. There were plenty of days when his philosophy lay in the dust and savage dogs of jealousy tore at it; more than one evening when he threw himself face downward on the bed and lay without moving for hours. And of these periods of despair he was always heartily ashamed the next day. The meeting with Max Wilson took place early in September, and under better circumstances than he could have hoped for. Sidney had come home for her weekly visit, and her mother's condition had alarmed her for the first time. When Le Moyne came home at six o'clock, he found her waiting for him in the hall. “I am just a little frightened, K.,” she said. “Do you think mother is looking quite well?” “She has felt the heat, of course. The summer--I often think--” “Her lips are blue!” “It's probably nothing serious.” “She says you've had Dr. Ed over to see her.” She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face. Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts. “I shall come home, of course. It's tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother--” She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she looked up. “I'm much braver than this in the hospital. But when it's one's own!” K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson, not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood--back even to Joe. But, with Anna's precarious health and Harriet's increasing engrossment in her business, he felt it more and more necessary that Sidney go on with her training. A profession was a safeguard. And there was another point: it had been decided that Anna was not to know her condition. If she was not worried she might live for years. There was no surer way to make her suspect it than by bringing Sidney home.