For some reason or other, notwithstanding her
manifest encouragement, he seemed to wish to keep their interview on a
purely formal basis.
"Let me repeat," he continued, "that I shall offer you no
comprehensive explanations, because they would not be truthful, nor
are they altogether necessary. In Ward Number Fourteen of your
hospital--you have been so splendid a patroness that every one calls
St. Agnes's your hospital--a serious operation was performed to-day
upon an Englishman named Phillips."
"I remember hearing about it," she assented. "The man is, I
understand, very ill."
"He is so ill that he has but one wish left in life," Jocelyn Thew
told her gravely. "That wish is to die in England. Just as you are at
the present moment in my debt for a certain service rendered, so am I
in his. He has called upon me to pay. He has begged me to make all the
arrangements for his immediate transportation to his native country."
She nodded sympathetically.
"It is a very natural wish," she observed, "so long as it does not
endanger his life."
"It does not endanger his life," her visitor replied, "because that is
already forfeit. I come now to the condition which involves you, which
explains my presence here this afternoon.
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