“Oh, I’ve shirked it. It won’t make much difference in the end, will it?”
“It might have, if you had come to me a year ago. Look here, I’m pretty rushed these days. Can you be here at eight-thirty to-morrow morning?”
“Certainly.”
At the end of four days Dane knew his fears were justified.
“You must be operated on at once, Barrington.”
“What for?”
“What for?” Dr. Alleyne looked at him. He had already discovered he had an unusual patient.
“I was really speaking to myself,” said Dane with a twisted smile. “Might the operation be fatal?”
“Well, I don’t want to boast, but I don’t have fatal operations.”
“So I’ve heard, but you could make one fatal, couldn’t you?”
The doctor stared across his desk at him.
“You might have a year or two after an operation, if you were careful, kept off stimulants, meat and drugs. Isn’t it worth it? It seems to me the stuff you’re writing these days ———”
Again the smile on the other man’s face stopped him.
“If I don’t have the operation how much time do you give me?”
“It will depend largely on yourself, whether you do as I’ve told you. But it is pretty far gone, and sometimes those things go quickly at the end. You might have six months. You might even have a year. It would depend on your endurance. It’s a matter of slow starvation.”
Dane got up from his chair and walked to the window. But he saw nothing of the street below. Indeed, he saw nothing that bore any relation to his immediate environ-
