“I’m afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that.”  For a terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a disappointment in love.  Was she going to have the unbelievable cruelty to tell him about it?

“I have to talk to somebody,” she said simply.  “And I came to you, because you’ve worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of experience.  It’s—­a matter of ethics.  But really it’s a matter of life and death.”

He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie, except that it had brought her to him.  There was something so direct and childlike about her.  The very way she drew a chair in front of him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before him, touched him profoundly.  He felt, somehow, incredibly old and experienced.

And then, after all that, to fail her!

“You see how it is,” she finished.  “I can’t go to the Staff, and they wouldn’t do anything if I did—­except possibly put me out.  Because a nurse really only follows orders.  And—­I’ve got to stay, if I can.  And Doctor Willie doesn’t believe in an operation and won’t see that he’s dying.  And everybody at home thinks he is right, because—­well,” she added hastily, “he’s been right a good many times.”

He listened attentively.  His record, you remember, was his own way some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of it.

“Well,” he said at last, “we’ll just make the Staff turn in and do it.  That’s easy.”

“But they won’t.  They can’t.”

“We can’t let Johnny die, either, can we?”

But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty without her,—­when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his arms were empty of something they had never held—­then it was that Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.

The hospital’s attitude was firm.  It could not interfere.  It was an outside patient and an outside doctor.  Its responsibility ended with providing for the care of the patient, under his physician’s orders.  It was regretful—­but, of course, unless the case was turned over to the Staff——­

He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been explained to him.  But she was not surprised.  He saw that, after all, she had really known he was going to fail her.

“It’s hopeless,” was all she said.  “Everybody is right, and everybody is wrong.”

It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her.  It was Johnny’s mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as an old suit of her mother’s.