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Varley advanced to meet her. She shuddered inwardly to think what a difference there was between the fallen creature she had left behind in the hospital and this tall, dark, self-contained man, whose name was familiar in the surgeries of Europe, who had climbed from being the son of a clockmaker to his present distinguished place.

“Have you come for absolution, also?” he asked, with a smile; “or is it to get a bill of excommunication against your only enemy–there couldn’t be more than one?”

Cheerful as his words were, he was shrewdly observing her, for her paleness and the strange light in her eyes gave him a sense of anxiety. He wondered what trouble was on her.

“Excommunication?” he repeated.

The unintended truth went home. She winced, even as she responded with that quaint note in her voice which gave humor to her speech. “Yes, excommunication,” she replied; “but why an enemy? Do we not need to excommunicate our friends sometimes?”

“That is a hard saying,” he answered, soberly.

Tears sprang to her eyes, but she mastered herself, and brought the crisis abruptly.

“I want you to save a man’s life,” she said, with her eyes looking straight into his. “Will you do it?”

His face grew grave and eager. “I want you to save a man’s happiness,” he answered. “Will you do it?”

“That man yonder will die unless your skill saves him,” she urged.

“This man here will go away unhappy and alone, unless your heart befriends him,” he replied, coming closer to her. “At sunrise to-morrow he goes.” He tried to take her hand.

“Oh, please, please,” she pleaded, with a quick, protesting gesture. “Sunrise is far off, but the man’s fate is near, and you must save him. You only can do so, for Doctor Hadley is away, and Doctor Brydon is sick, and in any case Doctor Brydon dare not attempt the operation alone. It is too critical and difficult, he says.”

“So I have heard,” he answered, with a new note in his voice, his professional instinct roused in spite of himself. “Who is this man? What interests you in him?”

“To how many unknown people have you given your skill for nothing–your skill and all your experience to utter strangers, no matter how low or poor! Is it not so? Well, I cannot give to strangers what you have given to so many, but I can help in my own way.”

“You want me to see the man at once?”

“If you will.”

“What is his name? I know of his accident and the circumstances.”

She hesitated for an instant, then said, “He is called Draper–a trapper and a woodsman.”

“But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise. All my arrangements are made,” he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes again.

“But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?” she pleaded, unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.

Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she had challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if she had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged in the mire her unspotted life–unspotted, for in all temptation, in her defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little home with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely, bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she remembered that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly; and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it, that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her, and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent ghost.