"I fear, little girl, your ambitions are only for those of unquestioned strength. You are but a pigmy. Certain organs, essential to the conversion of food into energy, were injured beyond all repair in your first illness. Other damage which neither time nor skill can make good was inflicted by your first operation. Your eyes are entirely inadequate for the merciless exactions of a life of art. You are at best but a delicate hot-house plant-beyond human power to develop into sufficient hardiness to be transplanted into the world of Bohemia, or into much of any world save a sheltered one. You can never be more than a semi-invalid." This sentence the great doctor pronounced only after his own opinion had been re-enforced by a conference of experts. And every word was true, as far as he and the experts had investigated. But there was the spirit of a Cavalier with which they had not reckoned. "I'll not have it so. Life, the life that you give me, isn't worth living. I shall have my two years in Europe with my art, if it takes all those other years you say I can have by saving myself." And she had them! One year first in New York in preparation, then two years in Rome. Three weeks she worked; one week she suffered. And how wonderfully she did suffer! She had been warned of the danger of drug- relief. And when doctors came and began filling their hypodermic syringes, her indignation blazed up. "If that's all you have for me, you needn't come. I could give that to myself." She learned that quiet and darkness, and, it seemed, fasting, dulled the edge of the pain and shortened its duration, and that nothing else did as much. There was another art student in Rome-a fine, poor American who, too, was studying art because he loved it. How they could have helped each other! They both knew it. It was as natural as life, after they had worked together a few months, for him to ask if she could wait while he earned, and made a name. She knew that waiting was not necessary; that she had plenty for them both and that she could help him, as few others, to more quickly win the fame which he was sure to attain. And she knew, too, that she could not so love another-there was never a doubt of that. But this time love was bitterly cruel. It came in all its affection and beauty only to sear and rend. She "must not marry," the great surgeon had told her. So gently and fatherly he had said it, that she did not realize its full import till now. Husbandless, childless, a chronic, incurable sufferer, she must tread the wine- press alone! The man had gone. She could give him no reason. She could not remember what she said to him. The world went black, and consciousness fled. For weeks she lay in an Italian hospital. Etta and her husband came, and the only rational words they could hear were her pleadings to be taken back to Dr. Kingsley.