at his chart. He talked happily and went away. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country.
“Don’t worry,” said the nurse encouragingly, “the mortality’s only four per cent. It used to be thirty. He’s reduced it.”
Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter’s vital grasp.
“Don’t worry, old boy!” she said, “you’re going to be as good as you ever were, after this.”
She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.
But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and trimmed deftly.
“All right!” he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. “Close the wound.”
Gant was dying of cancer.
Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth. He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.
“There,” he said pointing, “is where I spent part of my boyhood. Old Jeff Streeter’s hotel stood about there,” he pointed.
“Dig down!” said Helen, grinning.
Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate. His life seemed strange to him.
“We’ll go to see all those places when you get out of here. They’re going to let you out of here, day after to-morrow. Did you know that? Did you know you’re almost well?” she cried with a big smile.
“I’m going to be a well man after this,” said Gant. “I feel twenty years younger!”
“Poor old papa!” she said. “Poor old papa!”
Her eyes were wet. She put her big hands on his face, and drew his head against her.
