I have noticed that suffering frequently unnerves one, and that a person who has once been badly hurt lives in nervous terror of being hurt again." "You are very kind to try to excuse my fault," said he, "but the truth is I have always been a coward--from boyhood up." "Yet you embarked on all those dangerous expeditions." "Yes, just to have fun with myself; to sneer at the coward flesh, so to speak.

I used to long for dangers, and when they came upon me I would jeer at and revile the quaking I could not repress.

I pushed my shrinking body into peril and exulted in the punishment it received." Beth looked at him wonderingly.
"You are a strange man, indeed," said she.

"Really, I cannot understand your mental attitude at all." He chuckled and rubbed his hands together gleefully.
"I can," he returned, "for I know what causes it." And then he went away and left her, still seeming highly amused at her bewilderment.
In the operating room the next day Gys appeared with a rubber mask drawn across his features.

The girls decided that it certainly improved his appearance, odd as the masked face might appear to strangers.