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Warren. A screen was put around the bed while it was in progress; presently the screen was removed and the doctors and nurses went away. The riveter leaned over towards Warren.
    'Eh, mon,' he said. They say I'm to have an operation the morn.'
    'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Warren.
    ' Tis the Lord's will, and we must say naething against it.'
    'What's the operation f or?'
    Tor the colic I was telling you about. A something ulcer, they was calling it just now. But I don't know.'
    He lay back upon his pillows, inert and listless.
    'Duodenal ulcer,' said the nurse in response to Warren's enquiry, when she brought him his milk food for lunch. 'Doctor Miller's doing it tomorrow.'
    That afternoon the riveter's wife came to sit with him, a woman as tall and gaunt as Petersen himself, dressed in a faded black costume, with straggling grey hair and with appalling shoes. She brought with her a present of a sixpenny packet of cigarettes; the man in the-bed smoked one gravely and in perfect silence. The woman stayed with him for about an hour until they told her it was time to go; so far as Warren could detect they exchanged no words at all after the preliminary brief greetings. She came, and sat with him, and went away.
    Perhaps, thought Warren, there was nothing to be said.
    Next morning there was the bustle of preparation about the riveter in the next bed. They took him to the theatre about half-past ten; an hour later he was back again with the screen drawn close around the bed.
    Warren did not see him again. That the case was critical was evident from the attention of the doctors and the nurses. In the middle of the night Warren was roused by What was evidently a consultation of some sort; from behind the screen he heard a laboured breathing that was new to him. All the next day the sound of breathing grew in loudness with a rasping quality, as if the man were gasping for his breath.
    'Pneumonia,' said the nurse. 'He's very ill.'
    That night the riveter died.
    'What did he the of? ' Warren asked his nurse. 'How did he come to get pneumonia from an ulcerated stomach?'
    She shook her head. 'It just happens. When you're weak enough you can get anything, you know.'
    She brought around the packet of cigarettes, from which only one was taken. 'His wife said I was to give these away. Would you like one?'
    Warren lay and smoked in meditative silence. He found that he had a great deal to think about.
    Three days later, two more patients died on the same day. One was a man of forty-five or so with peritonitis, the other a boy of seventeen who had had an operation on his neck and jaw for some strange bone disease. To Warren, totally unused to hospital routine, there was no apparent reason for the deaths — the men went for operation, and then just died.
    The Almoner came down the ward next day distributing her papers and books. He stopped her by his bed. 'Have you got time to stop a minute? I want to know a bit more about this hospital.'
    'Why — yes. For a very few minutes.'
    She sat down by his bed.
    He fixed her with his eyes, cold and purposeful; he was becoming very much himself again. 'I don't want to ask anything that you can't answer, or that you ought not to tell me. But there's something wrong here, and I'd like to know what it is.'

'Something wrong?'
    'All these deaths.'
    She was silent. He went on, 'I've been here ten days now. In that time four people have died in this ward, out of the nineteen beds — all after operations. I suppose there may have been eight or nine operations in that time, counting my own. The way I see it, that's about fifty per cent of deaths. Surely that's not right?'
    'I think your figures are a little high. I should have said forty per cent, myself.'
    'You mean, that when one has an operation here it's little better than an even chance if one gets through?'
    She hesitated. 'I suppose that's what it comes to.'
    He was silent for a minute. Then he smiled at her. 'I don't want you to think I'm prying into