“As he waited, he half turned and saw a beggar sitting in the angle between the steps and the wall. There was a white dog beside him. The beggar’s face was partly bandaged; but what caught my friend’s attention most were his two hands. They were lying palms downwards on the beggar’s knees, bandaged like his face, but in the centre of each was a dark spot, showing through the wrapping, as if there were a festering wound that soaked through from underneath. My friend looked at him in disgust for a moment: but terribly fascinated by those quiet suffering hands; and then he passed on. But during all that afternoon he could not forget those hands. I daresay he was overwrought and nervous. But his memory too went back to the accident by the Marble Arch. That night too, as he told me in a conversation afterwards, as he tossed about, his windows wide open to catch the night air, half waking visions kept moving before him of a man with crushed feet and bandaged hands, who moaned and lifted a drawn face to the sky. “Early that autumn he was alone, except for the servants, in his father’s house in London. A maid was taken ill. I forget the nature of the illness, but perhaps you will be able to identify it when I have finished. At any rate the girl grew quickly worse. One morning just before he started to the City the doctor, who had called early that morning, asked to have a word with him, and told him he thought he ought to operate immediately, and asked for his sanction. “‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘of course I must speak to the girl about it. Have you told her yet?’ “‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘I thought I should mention it to you first. I understand that the girl has no relations in the world.’ “‘Can you tell me the nature of the operation?’ asked my friend. “‘It is not really serious. It is an incision in the right side,’ and he added a few details explaining the case. “‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘we had better go upstairs together.’ “They went up and found the girl perfectly conscious and reasonable. She consented to the operation, which was fixed for that evening. “But all that day the picture floated before his eyes of the quiet room at the top of the house, and the girl lying there waiting. And then the scene would shift a little. And he would see the girl after it was over, with a bandage against her side, and the knowledge of the little wound beneath. When he reached home, late in the evening, the doctor was waiting for him. “‘It has been perfectly successful,’ he said, ‘and I think she will recover.’