For some days in this battlefield of insatiable grief and petty cruelty, and with a dull pain steadily boring its way to recognition, Mr. Huss forced himself to carry on in a fashion the complex of business necessitated by the school disaster. Then in the night came a dream, as dreams sometimes will, to enlighten him upon his bodily condition. Projecting from his side he saw a hard, white body that sent round, wormlike tentacles into every corner of his being. A number of doctors were struggling to tear this thing away from him. At every effort the pain increased. He awoke, but the pain throbbed on. He lay quite still. Upon the heavy darkness he saw the word “Cancer,” bright red and glowing—as pain glows.... He argued in the face of invincible conviction. He kept the mood conditional. “If it be so,” he said, though he knew that the thing was so. What should he do? There would have to be operations, great expenses, enfeeblement.... Whom could he ask for advice? Who would help him?... Suppose in the morning he were to take a bathing ticket as if he meant to bathe, and struggle out beyond the mud-flats. He could behave as though cramp had taken him suddenly.... Five minutes of suffocation he would have to force himself through, and then peace—endless peace! “No,” he said, with a sudden gust of courage. “I will fight it out to the end.” But his mind was too dull to form plans and physically he was afraid. He would have to find a doctor somehow, and even that little task appalled him. Then he would have to tell Mrs. Huss.... For a time he lay quite still as if he listened to the alternative swell and diminuendo of his pain. “Oh! if I had someone to help me!” he whispered, and was overcome by the lonely misery of his position. “If I had someone!” For years he had never wept, but now tears were wrung from him. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow and tried to wriggle his body away from that steady gnawing; he fretted as a child might do. The night about him was as it were a great watching presence that would not help nor answer. § 3 Behind the brass plate at the corner which said “Dr. Elihu Barrack” Mr. Huss found a hard, competent young man, who had returned from the war to his practice at Sundering after losing a leg. The mechanical substitute seemed to have taken to him very kindly. He appeared to be both modest and resourceful; his unfavourable diagnosis was all the more convincing because it was tentative and conditional. He knew the very specialist for the case; no less a surgeon than Sir Alpheus Mengo came, it happened, quite frequently to play golf on the Sundering links. It would be easy to arrange for him to examine Mr. Huss in Dr. Barrack’s little consulting room, and if an operation had to be performed it could be managed with a minimum of expense in Mr. Huss’s own lodgings without any extra charge for mileage and the like.