the hospital; he explained cases to her, quoted lectures, and she, with
all a layman's rather morbid interest, was fascinated. He, with the aura
of travel, of learning, of experience in the ways of men, began to play
Othello to her Desdemona. Feeling at his ease with her, and getting
strength every day from the fact that yet another day had gone by
without a victory to his enemy, he lost his shyness; she began to feel
very humble as he talked largely, and her passion for understanding,
enlightenment, that had led her to read books she could not understand,
to talk to everyone and even to talk to herself, now enveloped him. She
opened her mouth to be fed from his stores. Sometimes he would talk of
London, a marvellous fairyland to her; tell her of "rags" in which he
had played the leading part; of things he had done when he was in Rio
for three months--Rio! the very name enthralled her! It smacked of
buccaneers and Francis Drake--of his life in New Zealand two years ago,
when, snatching himself from the outcasts of Christchurch and Auckland
he had flung himself valiantly into the prohibition district of the King
Country and lived with the Maoris for six months in the hope of finding
the tribal cure for cancer; of the time when, on a girl-chase, he had
toured with a theatrical company for a few months while his father
thought he was at the hospital working. Her sponge-like eagerness for
all the Romance, the Adventure he could give her was insidious in its
effect on him; she was flattered that he, with all his cleverness, his
"grown-up-ness" that went so queerly with his babyishness, should have
so thrown himself on her mercy; to her nineteen years it seemed a
wonderful and beautiful thing that a man of twenty-seven should find in
her an anchor. Of the three men she had known before, her father had
been, even in his weakness, her tyrant; Wullie had been her playmate all
her life; the doctor, all alone and friendless in a small, remote
village, had found in her an intelligent listener, and had talked quite
impersonally to her, as a safety-valve for his own loneliness. To them