“I’ve often wondered if she cared for him,” he murmured.

“For him?  For Worth!” I exclaimed in amazement.  “Were they friends?”

“Hardly more than acquaintances, I thought.  But she left very strangely the day of his death and never came back.”

From the physician’s corner there came an indeterminate grunt.

“If that is a request for further information, Doctor, I can say that on the few occasions when they met here in the library, it was only in the line of her duties.  He was interested in the twentieth-century poets.  But even that interest died out.  It was months before the—­the tragedy that he stopped coming to the Library.”

“It was months before the tragedy that he stopped going anywhere, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes.  Nobody understood it; least of all, his friends.  I even heard it hinted that he was suffering from some malady of the brain.”  He turned inquiringly to the far, dim corner.

Out of it the Little Red Doctor barked:  “Death had him by the throat.”

“Death?  In what form?”

“Slow, sure fingers, shutting off his breath.  Do you need further details or will the dry, scientific term, epithelioma, be enough?” The voice came grim out of the gloom.  No answer being returned, it continued:  “I’ve had easier jobs than telling Ned Worth.  It was hopeless from the first.  My old friend, Death, had too long a start on me.”

“Was it something that affected his mind?”

“No.  His mind was perfectly clear.  Vividly clear.  May I take my last verdict, when it comes, with a spirit as clear and as noble.”

Silence fell, and in the stillness we heard the Little Red Doctor communing with memories.  Now and then came a muttered word.  “Suicide!” in a snarl of scornful rejection.  “Fool-made definitions!” Presently, “Story for a romancer, not a physician.”  He seemed to be canvassing an inadequacy in himself with dissatisfaction.  Then, more clearly:  “Love from the first.  At a glance, perhaps.  The contagion of flame for powder.  But in that abyss together they saw each other’s soul.”

“The Little Red Doctor is turning poet,” said Sheldon to me in an incredulous whisper.

There was the snap and crackle of a match from the shadowed corner.  The keen, gnarled young face sprang from the darkness, vivid and softened with a strange triumph, then receded behind an imperfect circle, clouded the next instant by a nimbus of smoke.  The Little Red Doctor spoke.

Ned Worth was my friend as well as my patient.  No need to tell you men, who knew him, why I was fond of him.  I don’t suppose any one ever came in contact with that fantastic and smiling humanity of his without loving him for it.  “Immortal hilarity!” The phrase might have been coined for him.

It wasn’t as physician that I went home with Ned, after pronouncing sentence upon him, but as friend.  I didn’t want him to be alone that first night.  Yet I dare say that any one, seeing the two of us, would have thought me the one who had heard his life-limit defined.  He was as steady as a rock.