He could have killed himself for the words the moment they were spoken.
"They were at a road-house?"
"It is not just to judge anyone before you hear the story."
She stirred restlessly.
"What time is it?"
"Half-past six."
"I must get up and go on duty."
He was glad to be stern with her. He forbade her rising. When the nurse
came in with the belated ammonia, she found K. making an arbitrary ruling,
and Sidney looking up at him mutinously.
"Miss Page is not to go on duty to-day. She is to stay in bed until
further orders."
"Very well, Dr. Edwardes."
The confusion in Sidney's mind cleared away suddenly. K. was Dr. Edwardes!
It was K. who had performed the miracle operation--K. who had dared and
perhaps won! Dear K., with his steady eyes and his long surgeon's fingers!
Then, because she seemed to see ahead as well as back into the past in that
flash that comes to the drowning and to those recovering from shock, and
because she knew that now the little house would no longer be home to K.,
she turned her face into her pillow and cried. Her world had fallen
indeed. Her lover was not true and might be dying; her friend would go
away to his own world, which was not the Street.
K. left her at last and went back to Seventeen, where Dr. Ed still sat by
the bed. Inaction was telling on him. If Max would only open his eyes, so
he could tell him what had been in his mind all these years--his pride in
him and all that.
With a sort of belated desire to make up for where he had failed, he put
the bag that had been Max's bete noir on the bedside table, and began to
clear it of rubbish--odd bits of dirty cotton, the tubing from a long
defunct stethoscope, glass from a broken bottle, a scrap of paper on which
was a memorandum, in his illegible writing, to send Max a check for his
graduating suit. When K. came in, he had the old dog-collar in his hand.
"Belonged to an old collie of ours," he said heavily. "Milkman ran over
him and killed him. Max chased the wagon and licked the driver with his
own whip."
His face worked.
"Poor old Bobby Burns!" he said. "We'd raised him from a pup. Got him in a
grape-basket."
The sick man opened his eyes.