But Barney had become oblivious to her words and glances. He moved away
as in a dream to make ready for the home going of his party, for soon
the dancers would be at Sir Roger's. Nor did he waken from his dream
mood during the drive home. He could hear Dick chattering gaily to
Margaret and his mother of his College experiences, but except for an
occasional word with his father he sat in silence, gazing not upon the
fields and woods that lay in all their moonlit glory about them, but
upon that new world, vast, unreal, yet vividly present, whose horizon
lay beyond the line of vision, the world of his imagination, where he
must henceforth live and where his work must lie. For the events of the
afternoon had summoned a new self into being, a self unfamiliar, but
real and terribly insistent, demanding recognition. He could not analyse
the change that had come to him, nor could he account for it. He did not
try to. He lived again those great moments when, having been thrust by
chance into the command of these fifty mighty men, he had swung them
to victory. He remembered the ease, the perfect harmony with which his
faculties had wrought through those few minutes of fierce struggle.
Again he passed through the awful ordeal of the operation, now holding
the light, now assisting with forceps or cord or needle, now sponging
away that ghastly red flow that could not be stemmed. He wondered now at
his self-mastery. He could see again his fingers, bloody, but unshaking,
handing the old doctor a needle and silk cord. He remembered his
surprise and pity, almost contempt, for big Tom Magee lying on the
floor unable to lift his head; remembered, too, the strange absence of
anything like elation at the doctor's words, "My boy, you have the nerve
and the fingers of a surgeon, and that's what your Maker intended you to
be."

But he let his mind linger long and with thrilling joy through the