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“It is three weeks since you left the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“You should have come here before,” the surgeon was moved to say.

“No,” answered Helling. “I couldn’t come before, sir. You see, I had no ship. But I found one this morning, and I start to-morrow.”

“But for these three weeks? You have been starving.” Lincott slipped his hand into his pocket. It seemed to him afterwards simply providential that he did not fumble his money, that no clink of coins was heard. For Helling answered,

“Yes, sir, I’ve been starving.” He drew back his shoulders and laughed. “I’m proud to know that I’ve been starving.”

He laid his hat on the ground, drew out and unclasped his knife, felt along the waist-band of his breeches, cut a few stitches, and finally produced a little gold coin. This coin he held between his forefinger and thumb.

“Forty years ago,” he said, “when I was a nipper and starting on my first voyage, my mother gave me this. She sewed it up in the waist-band of my breeches with her own hands and told me never to part with it until I’d been starving. I’ve been near to starvation often and often enough. But I never have starved before. This coin has always stood between that and me. Now, however, I have actually been starving and I can part with it.”

He got up from his chair and timidly laid the piece of gold on the table by Lincott’s elbow. Then he picked up his hat. The surgeon said nothing, and he did not touch the coin. Neither did he look at Helling, but sat with his forehead propped in his hand as though he were reading the letters on his desk. Helling, afraid to speak lest his coin should be refused, walked noiselessly to the door and noiselessly unlatched it.

“Wait a bit!” said Lincott. Helling stopped anxiously in the doorway.

“Where have you slept”–Lincott paused to steady his voice–“for the last three weeks?” he continued.

“Under arches by the river, sir,” replied Helling. “On benches along the Embankment, once or twice in the parks. But that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “I’m all right. I’ve got my ship. I couldn’t part with that before, because it was the only thing I had to hang on to the world with. But I’m all right now.”

Lincott took up the coin and turned it over in the palm of his hand.

“Twenty kroners,” he said. “Do you know what that’s worth in England?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Helling with some trepidation.

“Fifteen shillings,” said Lincott. “Think of it, fifteen shillings, perhaps sixteen.”

“I know,” interrupted Helling quickly, mistaking the surgeon’s meaning. “But please, please, you mustn’t think I value what you have done for me at that. It’s only fifteen shillings, but it has meant a fortune to me all the last three weeks. Each time that I’ve drawn my belt tighter I have felt that coin underneath it burn against my skin. When I passed a coffee-stall in the early morning and saw the steam and the cake I knew I could have bought up the whole stall if I chose. I could have had meals, and meals, and meals. I could have slept in beds under roofs. It’s only fifteen shillings; nothing at all to you,” and he looked round the consulting-room, with its pictures and electric lights, “but I want you to take it at what it has been worth to me ever since I came out of the hospital.”

Lincott took Helling into his dining-room. On a pedestal stood a great silver vase, blazing its magnificence across the room.

“You see that?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Helling.

“It was given to me by a patient. It must have cost at the least L500.”

Helling tapped the vase with his knuckles.

“Yes, sir, that’s a present,” he said enviously. “That is a present.”

Lincott laughed and threw up the window.

“You can pitch it out into the street if you like. By the side of your coin it’s muck.”

Lincott keeps the coin. He points out that Helling was fifty-three at the time that he gave him this present, and that the operation was one which any practitioner could have performed.