They had looked, however, upon all that was before him as he worked.

They had seen, as he saw, the thing that no human skill could conquer.

He felt their eyes upon him as he turned the knife quickly, suddenly, surely, and then they had looked into his eyes as he raised them for a second.

He had spared his grandfather another month of agony, and they had seen everything.

It was not unlikely that the patient might have survived the anaesthetic, and it was equally probable that subsequent care on the part of the doctor and the nurse might have kept him alive long enough to permit his case to be recorded by virtue of his having escaped alive from the operating table, as one of those exasperatingly smug things known to the profession as a "successful operation,"-- sardonic prelude to an act of God! There seems to be no such thing as an unsuccessful operation.