But he could turn them into a lamp lit for the next person walking into the same dark, and he did, and it is still burning, and it will go on burning long after everyone who knew him is gone.

I was still sitting with the folder when David came out through the glass doors into the garden.

He is the Chief of Surgery now, the top of his profession, and the years show only in the silver that has come in at his temples; otherwise he is the same steady man who wept in a corridor and told me the truth when my husband could not.

“I knew I’d find you down here,” he said gently, and he came and sat beside me on the bench.