A khaki-clad padre came in. He just came over and asked me if I wanted anything, and did not worry me with talking. He had a very quiet voice and bald head. I liked both. I felt I ought to have wanted something: had I been discourteous? The door opened, and the doctor entered, with another nurse and another doctor. Somehow this last person electrified everyone and everything. Who was he? His very walk was somehow different from the ordinary. My attention was riveted on him; somehow I felt that he knew I was there, and yet he did not look at me. They wheeled a little table up from the other end of the room, laden with glasses and bottles and glittering little silver forks and things. I could not see clearly. An orderly was reprimanded by the nurse for something, in a subdued voice. There was a hush and a tenseness in this man’s presence. Yet he was calmly looking at a newspaper, and sitting on an empty bed as he did so! Apparently Kitchener was reported drowned in the North Sea: he spoke in a rich, almost drawling voice. He was immensely casual! And yet one did not mind. He walked over and washed his hands, and put on some yellowy-brown india-rubber gloves that scrooped and squelched in the basins. And then he turned round, and the other doctor (whom I had seen at four o’clock and who already seemed a sort of confidential friend of mine in the presence of this master-man) asked him, which case he wanted to see first. And as he jerked his hand casually to one of the beds, I was filled with a strange elation. This was a surgeon, I felt; and one in whom I had immense confidence. He would do the best for my arm: he would make no mistakes. I almost laughed for sheer joy! He came at last to my bed and glanced at me. He never smiled. He asked me one or two questions. I said I was “? fracture,” that my arm was throbbing but felt numb more than anything. “I suppose we may presume there is a fracture,” said he; “at any rate there is no point in looking at it here. I’ll look at it under an anæsthetic,” he said to me, not unkindly, but still without a smile. And a little later, as he went out, he half looked back at my bed. “Eleven o’clock,” he said to the nurse as he went out. The tension relaxed. An orderly spoke in a bold ordinary voice. The spell was gone out with the man. “Who is that?” I asked the nurse. “Oh! that’s Mr. Bevan; he’s a very good surgeon indeed.” “I know,” said I, “I can feel that.”