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By Root 20591 0

name, I am seriously opposed to operations of this kind, just as I am to the folly that brings girls and young men to the point where they seem to think they are necessary. A physician may not interfere in a case of this kind unless he is willing to spend ten years in prison, and I think that law is fair enough. Not that I don’t realize how painful your present situation appears to you. But there are always those who are willing to help a girl in your state, providing she doesn’t wish to do something which is morally and legally wrong. And so the very best advice I can give you now is that you do nothing at all now or at any time. Better go home and see your parents and confess. It will be much better—much better, I assure you. Not nearly as hard as you think or as wicked as this other way. Don’t forget there is a life there—a human—if it is really as you think. A human life which you are seeking to end and that I cannot help you to do. I really cannot. There may be doctors—I know there are—men here and there who take their professional ethics a little less seriously than I do; but I cannot let myself become one of them. I am sorry—very.

“So now the best I can say is—go home to your parents and tell them. It may look hard now but you are going to feel better about it in the long run. If it will make you or them feel any better about it, let them come and talk to me. I will try and make them see that this is not the worst thing in the world, either. But as for doing what you want—I am very, very sorry, but I cannot. My conscience will not permit me.”

He paused and gazed at her sympathetically, yet with a determined and concluded look in his eye. And Roberta, dumbfounded by this sudden termination of all her hopes in connection with him and realizing at last that not only had she been misled by Clyde’s information in regard to this doctor, but that her technical as well as emotional plea had failed, now walked unsteadily to the door, the terrors of the future crowding thick upon her. And once outside in the dark, after the doctor had most courteously and ruefully closed the door behind her, she paused to lean against a tree that was there—her nervous and physical strength all but failing her. He had refused to help her. He had refused to help her. And now what?

Chapter 38

The first effect of the doctor’s decision was to shock and terrify them both—Roberta and Clyde—beyond measure. For apparently now here was illegitimacy and disgrace for Roberta. Exposure and destruction for Clyde. And this had been their one solution seemingly. Then, by degrees, for Clyde at least, there was a slight lifting of the heavy pall. Perhaps, after all, as the doctor had suggested—and once she had recovered her senses sufficiently to talk, she had told him—the end had not been reached. There was the bare possibility, as suggested by the druggist, Short and the doctor, that she might be mistaken. And this, while not producing a happy reaction in her, had the unsatisfactory result of inducing in Clyde a lethargy based more than anything else on the ever-haunting fear of inability to cope with this situation as well as the certainty of social exposure in case he did not which caused him, instead of struggling all the more desperately, to defer further immediate action. For, such was his nature that, although he realized clearly the probably tragic consequences if he did not act, still it was so hard to think to whom else to apply to without danger to himself. To think that the doctor had “turned her down,” as he phrased it, and that Short’s advice should have been worth as little as that!

But apart from nervous thoughts as to whom to turn to next, no particular individual occurred to him before the two weeks were gone, or after. It was so hard to just ask anywhere. One just couldn’t do it. Besides, of whom could he ask now? Of whom? These things took time, didn’t they? Yet in the meantime, the days going by, both he and Roberta had ample time to consider what, if any, steps they must take—the one in regard to the other—in case no medical or