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“Oh, well, of course — for Doctor Maradick?” She must have seen that I implored her confidence, for, after a minute, she let fall almost carelessly a gleam of light on the situation.”It is a very sad case when you think what a charming man and a great surgeon Doctor Maradick is.”

Above the starched collar of my uniform I felt the blood leap in bounds to my cheeks.”I have spoken to him only once,” I murmured, “but he is charming, and, oh, so kind and handsome, isn’t he?”

“His patients adore him.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen that. Every one hangs on his visits.” Like the patients and the other nurses, I, also, had come by delightful, if imperceptible, degrees to hang on the daily visits of Doctor Maradick. He was, I suppose, born to be a hero to women. Fate had selected him for the rôle, and it would have been sheer impertinence for a mortal to cross wills with the invisible Powers. From my first day in his hospital, from the moment when I watched, through closed shutters, while he stepped out of his car, I have never doubted that he was assigned to the great part in the play. If I had been ignorant of his spell — of the charm he exercised over his hospital — I should have felt it in the waiting hush, like a drawn breath, which followed his ring at the door and preceded his imperious footstep on the stairs. My first impression of him, even after the terrible events of the next year, records a memory that is both careless and splendid. At that moment, when, gazing through the chinks in the shutters, I watched him, in his coat of dark fur, cross the pavement over the pale streaks of sunshine, I knew beyond any doubt — I knew with a sort of infallible prescience — that my fate was irretrievably bound with his in the future. I knew this, I repeat, though Miss Hemphill would still insist that my foreknowledge was merely a sentimental gleaning from indiscriminate novels. But it wasn’t only first love, impressionable as my kinswoman believed me to be. It wasn’t only the way he looked, handsome as he was. Even more than his appearance — more than the shining dark of his eyes, the silvery brown of his hair, the dusky glow in his face — even more than his charm and his magnificence, I think, the beauty and sympathy in his voice won my heart. It was a voice, I heard some one say afterward, that ought always to speak poetry.

So you will see why — if you do not understand at the beginning, I can never hope to make you believe impossible things! — so you will see why I accepted the call when it came as an imperative summons. I couldn’t have stayed away after he sent for me. However much I may have tried not to go, I know that in the end I must have gone. In those days, while I was still hoping to write novels, I used to talk a great deal about “destiny” (I have learned since then how silly all such talk is), and I suppose it was my “destiny” to be caught in the web of Roland Maradick’s personality. But I am not the first nurse to grow love-sick about a doctor who never gave her a thought.

“I am glad you got the call, Margaret. It may mean a great deal to you. Only try not to be too emotional about it.” I remember that Miss Hemphill was holding a bit of rose-geranium in her hand while she spoke — one of the patients had given it to her from a pot she kept in her room, and the scent of the flower is still in my nostrils — or my memory. Since then — oh, long since then — I have wondered if she also had been caught in the web.