Later I learned how the blow had fallen; a grim and brutal experience for so gentle a spirit as his. Three weeks after his Toinette was admitted to the Samaritan a forlorn-hope operation was determined upon. Happily, Orpheus knew nothing about it until it was all over, with unexpected promise of success and even complete cure. Once a week they let him see her. On the other six days he might call at the office for such information as a stolid and blank official chose to dole out. But no official could interpose his stolidity between Orpheus, piping at dead of night, and his Eurydice lying happily awake in the far upper wing of the hospital, knowing that he made his music for her and perhaps hearing it--who knows?--with the finer ear of the spirit. Vary his choice as he might, he told me, she always knew what he had played and could tell when they next saw each other. So all went well with those two young, brave hearts, and the meager reports grew increasingly hopeful, until one bright spring morning Orpheus paid his unfailing daily visit for information. A brusque young brute of an interne was at the desk, the regular official having stepped out. “Twenty-one?” he repeated in reply to Orpheus's gentle-voiced question. “That's the heart case. Died yesterday afternoon.” “But last night I played to her,” protested Orpheus in a piteous, stricken whisper, “and she heard and answered. It cannot be.” “Nutty!” said the interne to the information official who returned at this point. “Takes'em that way sometimes. Better get him out before he busts loose.” They got him out without trouble. He wandered into Our Square and watched the children dancing-in the May. They seemed to him like unreal creatures moving in a world of unrealities. More and more unreal grew everything about him until late that night he faced the grim reality of a barred door which kept him from his beloved dead, and that door he attacked with such fury and power that it took two policemen, in addition to the hospital corps, to subdue him. As he was a foreigner and vague and sorrow-stricken, the magistrate naturally gave him two months. He came out dazed but steadied. The one hold he had upon happiness was the delusion to which he so pathetically clung, the pretense, passionately cherished, that she was still alive. Poor Orpheus! He had indeed gone down into Hades for his Eurydice and stayed there. If he could find solace in his limbo of minor madness, perhaps that was best for him. So thought the Little Red Doctor, wise in human suffering, to whom alone I told the story of Orpheus. Said the Little Red Doctor first: “There are times when I blame my old friend Death for doing a job by halves”; and second: “Cure him? Who wants to cure peace with pain! Let him play his music”; and third: “God help that interne if I ever meet up with him!”