Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/221

 as an hysterical school-girl. And how she trusts me!"

She sat brooding dully for a moment.

"I can't feel as I want to about her case. Is there something I don't foresee?" she went on, putting the situation before herself with rigid truthfulness. "Lincoln agrees with me. So does Dr. Vandeveer. Still, I cannot help feeling there is something under it all that none of us grasps. There is this sense of some unappreciated element in the case which always comes up whenever I think of it. And I—am to operate on her to-morrow. She trusts me as if I were infallible!"

She threw back her head with an air of rebellious hopelessness. Before her came the picture of the patient as she had looked during the preliminary examination of the day before. She had come out of the ether repeating a portion of the Apostles Creed.

"I believe in God, the Father Almighty," she had murmured; then, suddenly, "And I believe in Dr. Van Nest, too; oh, I do believe in her. I believe in Elizabeth."

The consulting surgeons had smiled irresistibly, the little incident revealed so fully the discussion that must have been waged in the patient's home. Her friends had urged a man surgeon for the operation. But Dr. Van