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Red Pepper's Patients

by Grace S. Richmond · English · Gutenberg #16115 · 361,030 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Red Pepper's Patients

Author: Grace S. Richmond


        
Release date: June 23, 2005 [eBook #16115]
                Most recently updated: December 11, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16115

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Irma Spehar, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RED PEPPER'S PATIENTS ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Irma Spehar, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)



RED PEPPER'S PATIENTS

With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular

by

GRACE S. RICHMOND

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1918







[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE]



[Illustration: "Red Pepper" Burns, M.D.]




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I.      AN INTELLIGENT PRESCRIPTION

   II.     LITTLE HUNGARY

   III.    ANNE LINTON'S TEMPERATURE

   IV.     TWO RED HEADS

   V.      SUSQUEHANNA

   VI.     HEAVY LOCAL MAILS

   VII.    WHITE LILACS

   VIII.   EXPERT DIAGNOSIS

   IX.     JORDAN IS A MAN

   X.      THE SURGICAL FIRING LINE

   XI.     THE ONLY SAFE PLACE

   XII.    THE TRUTH ABOUT SUSQUEHANNA

   XIII.   RED HEADED AGAIN

   XIV.    A STRANGE DAY

   XV.     CLEARED DECKS

   XVI.    WHITE LILACS AGAIN

   XVII.   RED'S DEAREST PATIENTS





CHAPTER I


AN INTELLIGENT PRESCRIPTION

The man in the silk-lined, London-made overcoat, holding his hat firmly
on his head lest the January wind send its expensive perfection into the
gutter, paused to ask his way of the man with no overcoat, his hands
shoved into his ragged pockets, his shapeless headgear crowded down over
his eyes, red and bleary with the piercing wind.

"Burns?" repeated the second man to the question of the first. "Doc
Burns? Sure! Next house beyond the corner--the brick one." He turned to
point. "Tell it by the rigs hitched. It's his office hours. You'll do
some waitin', tell ye that."

The questioner smiled--a slightly superior smile. "Thank you," he said,
and passed on. He arrived at the corner and paused briefly, considering
the row of vehicles in front of the old, low-lying brick house with its
comfortable, white-pillared porches. The row was indeed a formidable
one and suggested many waiting people within the house. But after an
instant's hesitation he turned up the gravel path toward the wing of the
house upon whose door could be seen the lettering of an inconspicuous
sign. As he came near he made out that the sign read "R.P. Burns, M.D.,"
and that the table of office hours below set forth that the present hour
was one of those designated.

"I'll get a line on your practice, Red," said the stranger to himself,
and laid hand upon the doorbell. "Incidentally, perhaps, I'll get a line
on why you stick to a small suburban town like this when you might be in
the thick of things. A fellow whom I've twice met in Vienna, too. I
can't understand it."

A fair-haired young woman in a white uniform and cap admitted the
newcomer and pointed him to the one chair left unoccupied in the large
and crowded waiting-room. It was a pleasant room, in a well-worn sort of
way, and the blazing wood fire in a sturdy fireplace, the rows of
dull-toned books cramming a solid phalanx of bookcases, and a number of
interesting old prints on the walls gave it, as the stranger, lifting
critical eyes, was obliged to admit to himself, a curious air of dignity
in spite of the mingled atmosphere of drugs and patients which assailed
his fastidious nostrils. As for the patients themselves, since they
were all about him, he could hardly do less than observe them, although
he helped himself to a late magazine from a well-filled table at his
side and mechanically turned its pages.

The first to claim his attention was a little girl at his elbow. She
could hardly fail to catch his eye, she was so conspicuous with
bandages. One eye, one cheek, the whole of her neck, and both her hands
were swathed in white, but the other cheek was rosy, and the uncovered
eye twinkled bravely as she smiled at the stranger. "I was burned," she
said proudly.

"I see," returned the stranger, speaking very low, for he was conscious
that the entire roomful of people was listening. "And you are getting
better?"

"Oh, yes!" exulted the child. "Doctor's making me have new skin. He gets
me more new skin every day. I didn't have any at all. It was all burned
off."

"That's very good of him," murmured the stranger.

"He's awful good," said the child, "when he isn't cross. He isn't ever
cross to me, Doctor isn't."

There was a general murmur of amusement in the room, and another child,
not far away, laughed aloud. The stranger furtively scrutinized the
other patients one by one, lifting apparently casual glances from
behind his magazine. Several, presumably the owners of the vehicles
outside, were of the typical village type, but there were others more
sophisticated, and several who were palpably persons of wealth. One late
comer was admitted who left a luxuriously appointed motor across the
street, and brought in with her an atmosphere of costly furs and violets
and fresh air.

"Certainly a mixed crowd," said the stranger to himself behind his
magazine; "but not so different, after all, from most doctors'
waiting-room crowds. I might send in a card, but, if I remember Red, it
wouldn't get me anything--and this is rather interesting anyhow. I'll
wait."

He waited, for he wished the waiting room to be clear when he should
approach that busy consulting room beyond. Meanwhile, people came and
went. The door into the inner room would swing open, a patient would
emerge, a curt but pleasant "Good-bye" in a deep voice following him or
her out, and the fair-haired nurse, who sat at a desk near the door or
came out of the consulting room with the patient, would summon the next.
The lady of the furs and violets sent in her card, but, as the stranger
had anticipated in his own case, it procured her no more than an
assurance from the nurse that Doctor Burns would see her in due course.
Since he wanted the coast clear the stranger, when at last his turn
arrived, politely waived his rights, sent the furs and violets in before
him, and sat alone with the nurse in the cleared waiting room.

A comparatively short period of time elapsed before the consulting-room
door opened once more. But it closed again--almost--and a few words
reached the outer room.

"Oh, but you're hard--hard, Doctor Burns! I simply can't do it," said a
plaintive voice.

"Then don't expect me to accomplish anything. It's up to
you--absolutely," replied a brusque voice, which then softened slightly
as it added: "Cheer up. You can, you know. Good-bye."

The patient came out, her lips set, her eyes lowered, and left the
office as if she wanted nothing so much as to get away. The nurse rose
and began to say that Doctor Burns would now see his one remaining
caller, but at that moment Doctor Burns himself appeared in the doorway,
glanced at the stranger, who had risen, smiling--and the need for an
intermediary between physician and patient vanished before the onslaught
of the physician himself.

"My word! Gardner Coolidge! Well, well--if this isn't the greatest thing
on earth. My dear fellow!"

The stranger, no longer a stranger, with his hand being wrung like
that, with his eyes being looked into by a pair of glowing hazel eyes
beneath a heavy thatch of well-remembered coppery hair, returned this
demonstration of affection with equal fervour.

"I've been sitting in your stuffy waiting room, Red, till the entire
population of this town should tell you its aches, just for the pleasure
of seeing you with the professional manner off."

Burns threw back his head and laughed, with a gesture as of flinging
something aside. "It's off then, Cooly--if I have one. I didn't know I
had. How are you? Man, but it's good to see you! Come along out of this
into a place that's not stuffy. Where's your bag? You didn't leave it
anywhere?"

"I can't stay, Red--really I can't. Not this time. I must go to-night.
And I came to consult you professionally--so let's get that over first."

"Of course. Just let me speak a word to the authorities. You'll at least
be here for dinner? Step into the next room, Cooly. On your way let me
present you to my assistant, Miss Mathewson, whom I couldn't do without.
Mr. Coolidge, Miss Mathewson."

Gardner Coolidge bowed to the office nurse, whom he had already
classified as a very attractively superior person and well worth a good
salary; then went on into the consulting room, where an open window had
freshened the small place beyond any possibility of its being called
stuffy. As he closed the window with a shiver and looked about him,
glancing into the white-tiled surgery beyond; he recognized the fact
that, though he might be in the workshop of a village practitioner, it
was a workshop which did not lack the tools of the workman thoroughly
abreast of the times.

Burns came back, his face bright with pleasure in the unexpected
appearance of his friend. He stood looking across the small room at
Coolidge, as if he could get a better view of the whole man at a little
distance. The two men were a decided contrast to each other. Redfield
Pepper Burns, known to all his intimates, and to many more who would not
have ventured to call him by that title, as "Red Pepper Burns," on
account of the combination of red head, quick temper, and wit which were
his most distinguishing characteristics of body and mind, was a stalwart
fellow whose weight was effectually kept down by his activity. His white
linen office jacket was filled by powerful shoulders, and the perfectly
kept hands of the surgeon gave evidence, as such hands do, of their
delicacy of touch, in the very way in which Burns closed the door behind
him.

Gardner Coolidge was of a different type altogether. As tall as Burns,
he looked taller because of his slender figure and the distinctive
outlines of his careful dress. His face was dark and rather thin,
showing sensitive lines about the eyes and mouth, and a tendency to
melancholy in the eyes themselves, even when lighted by a smile, as now.
He was manifestly the man of worldly experience, with fastidious tastes,
and presumably one who did not accept the rest of mankind as comrades
until proved and chosen.

"So it's my services you want?" questioned Burns. "If that's the case,
then it's here you sit."

"Face to the light, of course," objected Coolidge with a grimace. "I
wonder if you doctors know what a moral advantage as well as a physical
one that gives you."

"Of course. The moral advantage is the one we need most. Anybody can see
when a skin is jaundiced; but only by virtue of that moral standpoint
can we detect the soul out of order. And that's the matter with you,
Cooly."

"What!" Coolidge looked startled. "I knew you were a man who jumped to
conclusions in the old days--"

"And acted on them, too," admitted Burns. "I should say I did. And got
myself into many a scrape thereby, of course. Well, I jump to
conclusions now, in just the same way, only perhaps with a bit more
understanding of the ground I jump on. However, tell me your symptoms
in orthodox style, please, then we'll have them out of the way."

Coolidge related them somewhat reluctantly because, as he went on, he
was conscious that they did not appear to be of as great importance as
this visit to a physician seemed to indicate he thought them. The most
impressive was the fact that he was unable to get a thoroughly good
night's sleep except when physically exhausted, which in his present
manner of life he seldom was. When he had finished and looked around--he
had been gazing out of the window--he found himself, as he had known he
should, under the intent scrutiny of the eyes he was facing.

"What did the last man give you for this insomnia?" was the abrupt
question.

"How do you know I have been to a succession of men?" demanded Coolidge
with a touch of evident irritation.

"Because you come to me. We don't look up old friends in the profession
until the strangers fail us," was the quick reply.

"More hasty conclusions. Still, I'll have to admit that I let our family
physician look me over, and that he suggested my seeing a nerve
man--Allbright. He has rather a name, I believe?"

"Sure thing. What did he recommend?"

"A long sea voyage. I took it--having nothing else to do--and slept a
bit better while I was away. The minute I got back it was the old
story."

"Nothing on your mind, I suppose?" suggested Burns.

"I supposed you'd ask me that stock question. Why shouldn't there be
something on my mind? Is there anybody whose mind is free from a weight
of some sort?" demanded Gardner Coolidge. His thin face flushed a
little.

"Nobody," admitted Burns promptly. "The question is whether the weight
on yours is one that's got to stay there or whether you may be rid of
it. Would you care to tell me anything about it? I'm a pretty old
friend, you know."

Coolidge was silent for a full minute, then he spoke with evident
reluctance: "It won't do a particle of good to tell, but I suppose, if I
consult you, you have a right to know the facts. My wife--has gone back
to her father."

"On a visit?" Burns inquired.

Coolidge stared at him. "That's like you, Red," he said, irritation in
his voice again. "What's the use of being brutal?"

"Has she been gone long enough for people to think it's anything more
than a visit?"

"I suppose not. She's been gone two months. Her home is in California."

"Then she can be gone three without anybody's thinking trouble. By the
end of that third month you can bring her home," said Burns comfortably.
He leaned back in his swivel-chair, and stared hard at the ceiling.

Coolidge made an exclamation of displeasure and got to his feet. "If you
don't care to take me seriously--" he began.

"I don't take any man seriously who I know cared as much for his wife
when he married her as you did for Miss Carrington--and whose wife was
as much in love with him as she was with you--when he comes to me and
talks about her having gone on a visit to her father. Visits are good
things; they make people appreciate each other."

"You don't--or won't--understand." Coolidge evidently strove hard to
keep himself quiet. "We have come to a definite understanding that we
can't--get on together. She's not coming back. And I don't want her to."

Burns lowered his gaze from the ceiling to his friend's face, and the
glance he now gave him was piercing. "Say that last again," he demanded.

"I have some pride," replied the other haughtily, but his eyes would not
meet Burns's.

"So I see. Pride is a good thing. So is love. Tell me you don't love her
and I'll--No, don't tell me that. I don't want to hear you perjure
yourself. And I shouldn't believe you. You may as well own up"--his
voice was gentle now--"that you're suffering--and not only with hurt
pride." There was silence for a little. Then Burns began again, in a
very low and quiet tone: "Have you anything against her, Cooly?"

The man before him, who was still standing, turned upon him. "How can
you ask me such a question?" he said fiercely.

"It's a question that has to be asked, just to get it out of the way.
Has she anything against you?"

"For heaven's sake--no! You know us both."

"I thought I did. Diagnosis, you know, is a series of eliminations. And
now I can eliminate pretty nearly everything from this case except a
certain phrase you used a few minutes ago. I'm inclined to think it's
the cause of the trouble." Coolidge looked his inquiry. "'_Having
nothing else to do._'"

Coolidge shook his head. "You're mistaken there. I have plenty to do."

"But nothing you couldn't be spared from--unless things have changed
since the days when we all envied you. You're still writing your name on
the backs of dividend drafts, I suppose?"

"Red, you are something of a brute," said Coolidge, biting his lip. But
he had taken the chair again.

"I know," admitted Red Pepper Burns. "I don't really mean to be, but the
only way I can find out the things I need to know is to ask straight
questions. I never could stand circumlocution. If you want that, Cooly;
if you want what are called 'tactful' methods, you'll have to go to some
other man. What I mean by asking you that one is to prove to you that
though you may have something to do, you have no job to work at. As it
happens you haven't even what most other rich men have, the trouble of
looking after your income--and as long as your father lives you won't
have it. I understand that; he won't let you. But there's a man with a
job--your father. And he likes it so well he won't share it with you. It
isn't the money he values, it's the job. And collecting books or curios
or coins can never be made to take the place of good, downright hard
work."

"That may be all true," acknowledged Coolidge, "but it has nothing to do
with my present trouble. My leisure was not what--" He paused, as if he
could not bear to discuss the subject of his marital unhappiness.

The telephone bell in the outer office rang sharply. An instant later
Miss Mathewson knocked, and gave a message to Burns. He read it,
nodded, said "Right away," and turned back to his friend.

"I have to leave you for a bit," he said. "Come in and meet my wife and
one of the kiddies. The other's away just now. I'll be back in time for
dinner. Meanwhile, we'll let the finish of this talk wait over for an
hour or two. I want to think about it."

He exchanged his white linen office-jacket for a street coat, splashing
about with soap and water just out of sight for a little while before he
did so, and reappeared looking as if he had washed away the fatigue of
his afternoon's work with the physical process. He led Gardner Coolidge
out of the offices into a wide separating hall, and the moment the door
closed behind him the visitor felt as if he had entered a different
world.

Could this part of the house, he thought, as Burns ushered him into the
living room on the other side of the hall and left him there while he
went to seek his wife, possibly be contained within the old brick walls
of the exterior? He had not dreamed of finding such refinement of beauty
and charm in connection with the office of the village doctor. In half a
dozen glances to right and left Gardner Coolidge, experienced in
appraising the belongings of the rich and travelled of superior taste
and breeding, admitted to himself that the genius of the place must be
such a woman as he would not have imagined Redfield Pepper Burns able
to marry.

He had not long to wait for the confirmation of his insight. Burns
shortly returned, a two-year-old boy on his shoulder, his wife
following, drawn along by the child's hand. Coolidge looked, and liked
that which he saw. And he understood, with one glance into the dark eyes
which met his, one look at the firm sweetness of the lovely mouth, that
the heart of the husband must safely trust in this woman.

Burns went away at once, leaving Coolidge in the company of Ellen, and
the guest, eager though he was for the professional advice he had come
to seek, could not regret the necessity which gave him this hour with a
woman who seemed to him very unusual. Charm she possessed in full
measure, beauty in no less, but neither of these terms nor both together
could wholly describe Ellen Burns. There was something about her which
seemed to glow, so that he soon felt that her presence in the quietly
rich and restful living room completed its furnishing, and that once
having seen her there the place could never be quite at its best without
her.

Burns came back, and the three went out to dinner. The small boy, a
handsome, auburn-haired, brown-eyed composite of his parents, had been
sent away, the embraces of both father and mother consoling him for his
banishment to the arms of a coloured mammy. Coolidge thoroughly enjoyed
the simple but appetizing dinner, of the sort he had known he should
have as soon as he had met the mistress of the house. And after it he
was borne away by Burns to the office.

"I have to go out again at once," the physician announced. "I'm going to
take you with me. I suppose you have a distaste for the sight of
illness, but that doesn't matter seriously. I want you to see this
patient of mine."

"Thank you, but I don't believe that's necessary," responded Coolidge
with a frown. "If Mrs. Burns is too busy to keep me company I'll sit
here and read while you're out."

"No, you won't. If you consult a man you're bound to take his
prescriptions. I'm telling you frankly, for you'd see through me if I
pretended to take you out for a walk and then pulled you into a house.
Be a sport, Cooly."

"Very well," replied the other man, suppressing his irritation. He was
almost, but not quite, wishing he had not yielded to the unexplainable
impulse which had brought him here to see a man who, as he should have
known from past experience in college days, was as sure to be eccentric
in his methods of practising his profession as he had been in the
conduct of his life as a student.

The two went out into the winter night together, Coolidge remarking that
the call must be a brief one, for his train would leave in a little more
than an hour.

"It'll be brief," Burns promised. "It's practically a friendly call
only, for there's nothing more I can do for the patient--except to see
him on his way."

Coolidge looked more than ever reluctant. "I hope he's not just leaving
the world?"

"What if he were--would that frighten you? Don't be worried; he'll not
go to-night."

Something in Burns's tone closed his companion's lips. Coolidge resented
it, and at the same time he felt constrained to let the other have his
way. And after all there proved to be nothing in the sight he presently
found himself witnessing to shock the most delicate sensibilities.

It was a little house to which Burns conducted his friend and latest
patient; it was a low-ceiled, homely room, warm with lamplight and
comfortable with the accumulations of a lifetime carefully preserved. In
the worn, old, red-cushioned armchair by a glowing stove sat an aged
figure of a certain dignity and attractiveness in spite of the lines and
hues plainly showing serious illness. The man was a man of education
and experience, as was evident from his first words in response to
Burns's greeting.

"It was kind of you to come again to-night, Doctor. I suspect you know
how it shortens the nights to have this visit from you in the evening."

"Of course I know," Burns responded, his hand resting gently on the
frail shoulder, his voice as tender as that of a son's to a father whom
he knows he is not long to see.

There was a woman in the room, an old woman with a pathetic face and
eyes like a mourning dog's as they rested on her husband. But her voice
was cheerful and full of quiet courage as she answered Burns's
questions. The pair received Gardner Coolidge as simply as if they were
accustomed to meet strangers every day, spoke with him a little, and
showed him the courtesy of genuine interest when he tried to entertain
them with a brief account of an incident which had happened on his train
that day. Altogether, there was nothing about the visit which he could
have characterized as painful from the point of view of the layman who
accompanies the physician to a room where it is clear that the great
transition is soon to take place. And yet there was everything about it
to make it painful--acutely painful--to any man whose discernment was
naturally as keen as Coolidge's.

That the parting so near at hand was to be one between lovers of long
standing could be read in every word and glance the two gave each other.
That they were making the most of these last days was equally apparent,
though not a word was said to suggest it. And that the man who was
conducting them through the fast-diminishing time was dear to them as a
son could have been read by the very blind.

"It's so good of you--so good of you, Doctor," they said again as Burns
rose to go, and when he responded: "It's good to myself I am, my dears,
when I come to look at you," the smiles they gave him and each other
were very eloquent.

Outside there was silence between the two men for a little as they
walked briskly along, then Coolidge said reluctantly: "Of course I
should have a heart of stone if I were not touched by that scene--as you
knew I would be."

"Yes, I knew," said Burns simply; and Coolidge saw him lift his hand and
dash away a tear. "It gets me, twice a day regularly, just as if I
hadn't seen it before. And when I go back and look at the woman I love I
say to myself that I'll never let anything but the last enemy come
between us if I have to crawl on my knees before her."

Suddenly Coolidge's throat contracted. His resentment against his friend
was gone. Surely it was a wise physician who had given him that
heartbreaking little scene to remember when he should be tempted to
harden his heart against the woman he had chosen.

"Red," he said bye and bye, when the two were alone together for a few
minutes again in the consulting room before he should leave for his
train, "is that all the prescription you're going to give me--a trip to
California? Suppose I'm not successful?"

Red Pepper Burns smiled, a curious little smile. "You've forgotten what
I told you about the way my old man and woman made a home together,' and
worked at their market gardening together, and read and studied
together--did everything from first to last _together_. That's the whole
force of the illustration, to my mind, Cooly. It's the standing shoulder
to shoulder to face life that does the thing. Whatever plan you make for
your after life, when you bring Alicia back with you--as you will; I
know it--make it a plan which means partnership--if you have to build a
cottage down on the edge of your estate and live alone there together.
Alone till the children come to keep you company," he added with a
sudden flashing smile.

Coolidge looked at him and shook his head. His face dropped back into
melancholy. He opened his lips and closed them again. Red Pepper Burns
opened his own lips--and closed them again. When he did speak it was to
say, more gently than he had yet spoken:

"Old fellow, life isn't in ruins before you. Make up your mind to that.
You'll sleep again, and laugh again--and cry again, too,--because life
is like that, and you wouldn't want it any other way."

It was time for Coolidge to go, and the two men went in to permit the
guest to take leave of Mrs. Burns. When they left the house Coolidge
told his friend briefly what he thought of his friend's wife, and Burns
smiled in the darkness as he heard.

"She affects most people that way," he answered with a proud little ring
in his voice. But he did not go on to talk about her; that would have
been brutal indeed in Coolidge's unhappy circumstances.

At the train Coolidge turned suddenly to his physician. "You haven't
given me anything for my sleeplessness," he said.

"Think you must have a prescription?" Burns inquired, getting out his
blank and pen.

"It will take some time for your advice to work out, if it ever does,"
Coolidge said. "Meanwhile, the more good sleep I get the fitter I shall
be for the effort."

"True enough. All right, you shall have the prescription."

Burns wrote rapidly, resting the small leather-bound book on his knee,
his foot on an iron rail of the fence which kept passengers from
crowding. He read over what he had written, his face sober, his eyes
intent. He scrawled a nearly indecipherable "_Burns_" at the bottom,
folded the slip and handed it to his friend. "Put it away till you're
ready to get it filled," he advised.

The two shook hands, gripping tightly and looking straight into each
other's eyes.

"Thank you, Red, for it all," said Gardner Coolidge. "There have been
minutes when I felt differently, but I understand you better now. And I
see why your waiting room is full of patients even on a stormy day."

"No, you don't," denied Red Pepper Burns stoutly. "If you saw me take
their heads off you'd wonder that they ever came again. Plenty of them
don't--and I don't blame them--when I've cooled off."

Coolidge smiled. "You never lie awake thinking over what you've said or
done, do you, Red? Bygones are bygones with a man like you. You couldn't
do your work if they weren't!"

A peculiar look leaped into Burns's eyes. "That's what the outsiders
always think," he answered briefly.

"Isn't it true?"

"You may as well go on thinking it is--and so may the rest. What's the
use of explaining oneself, or trying to? Better to go on looking
unsympathetic--and suffering, sometimes, more than all one's patients
put together!"

Coolidge stared at the other man. His face showed suddenly certain grim
lines which Coolidge had not noticed there before--lines written by
endurance, nothing less. But even as the patient looked the physician's
expression changed again. His sternly set lips relaxed into a smile, he
pointed to a motioning porter.

"Time to be off, Cooly," he said. "Mind you let me know how--you are.
Good luck--the best of it!"

       *       *       *       *       *

In the train Coolidge had no sooner settled himself than he read Burns's
prescription. He had a feeling that it would be different from other
prescriptions, and so it proved:

     Rx

     Walk five miles every evening.

     Drink no sort of stimulant, except one cup of coffee at
     breakfast.

     Begin to make plans for the cottage. Don't let it turn out a
     palace.

     Ask the good Lord every night to keep you from being a proud
     fool.

     BURNS.




CHAPTER II

LITTLE HUNGARY


"Not hungry, Red? After all that cold drive to-day? Would you like to
have Cynthia make you something special, dear?"

R.P. Burns, M.D., shook his head. "No, thanks." He straightened in his
chair, where he sat at the dinner table opposite his wife. He took up
his knife and fork again and ate valiantly a mouthful or two of the
tempting food upon his plate, then he laid the implements down
decisively. He put his elbow on the table and leaned his head upon his
hand. "I'm just too blamed tired to eat, that's all," he said.

"Then don't try. I'm quite through, too. Come in the living room and lie
down a little. It's such a stormy night there may be nobody in."

Ellen slipped her hand through his arm and led the way to the big blue
couch facing the fireplace. He dropped upon it with a sigh of fatigue.
His wife sat down beside him and began to pass her fingers lightly
through his heavy hair, with the touch which usually soothed him into
slumber if no interruptions came to summon him. But to-night her
ministrations seemed to have little effect, for he lay staring at a
certain picture on the wall with eyes which evidently saw beyond it into
some trying memory.

"Is the whole world lying heavy on your shoulders to-night, Red?" Ellen
asked presently, knowing that sometimes speech proved a relief from
thought.

He nodded. "The whole world--millions of tons of it. It's just because
I'm tired. There's no real reason why I should take this day's work
harder than usual--except that I lost the Anderson case this morning.
Poor start for the day, eh?"

"But you knew you must lose it. Nobody could have saved that poor
creature."

"I suppose not. But I wanted to save him just the same. You see, he
particularly wanted to live, and he had pinned his whole faith to me. He
wouldn't give it up that I could do the miracle. It hurts to disappoint
a faith like that."

"Of course it does," she said gently. "But you must try to forget now,
Red, because of to-morrow. There will be people to-morrow who need you
as much as he did."

"That's just what I'd like to forget," he murmured. "Everything's gone
wrong to-day--it'll go worse to-morrow."

She knew it was small use to try to combat this mood, so unlike his
usual optimism, but frequent enough of occurrence to make her understand
that there is no depression like that of the habitually buoyant, once it
takes firm hold. She left him presently and went to sit by the reading
lamp, looking through current magazines in hope of finding some article
sufficiently attractive to capture his interest, and divert his heavy
thoughts. His eyes rested absently on her as she sat there, a charming,
comradely figure in her simple home dinner attire, with the light on her
dark hair and the exquisite curve of her cheek.

It was a fireside scene of alluring comfort, the two central figures of
such opposite characteristics, yet so congenial. The night outside was
very cold, the wind blowing stormily in great gusts which now and then
howled down the chimney, making the warmth and cheer within all the more
appealing.

Suddenly Ellen, hunting vainly for the page she sought, lifted her head,
to see her husband lift his at the same instant.

"Music?" she questioned. "Where can it come from? Not outside on such a
night as this?"

"Did you hear it, too? I've been thinking it my imagination."

"It must be the wind, but--no, it _is_ music!"

She rose and went to the window, pushing aside draperies and setting her
face to the frosty pane. The next instant she called in a startled way:

"Oh, Red--come here!"

He came slowly, but the moment he caught sight of the figure in the
storm outside his langour vanished.

"Good heavens! The poor beggar! We must have him in."

He ran to the hall and the outer door, and Ellen heard his shout above
the howling of the wind.

"Come in--come in!"

She reached the door into the hall as the slender young figure stumbled
up the steps, a violin clutched tight in fingers purple with cold. She
saw the stiff lips break into a frozen smile as her husband laid his
hand upon the thinly clad shoulder and drew the youth where he could
close the door.

"Why didn't you come to the door and ring, instead of fiddling out there
in the cold!" demanded Burns. "Do you think we're heathen, to shut
anybody out on a night like this?"

The boy shook his head. He was a boy in size, though the maturity of his
thin face suggested that he was at least nineteen or twenty years old.
His dark eyes gleamed out of hollow sockets, and his black hair,
curling thickly, was rough with neglect. But he had snatched off his
ragged soft hat even before he was inside the door, and for all the
stiffness of his chilled limbs his attitude, as he stood before his
hosts, had the unconscious grace of the foreigner.

"Where do you come from?" Burns asked.

Again the stranger shook his head.

"He can't speak English," said Ellen.

"Probably not--though he may be bluffing. We must warm and feed him,
anyhow. Will you have him in here, or shall I take him in the office?"

Ellen glanced again at the shivering youth, noted that the purple hands
were clean, even to the nails, and led the way unhesitatingly into the
living room with all its beckoning warmth and beauty.

"Good little sport--I knew you would," murmured Burns, as he beckoned
the boy after him.

Ellen left the two alone together by the fire, while she went to prepare
a tray with Cynthia in the kitchen, filling it with the hearty food
Burns himself had left untouched. Big slices of juicy roast beef, two
hurriedly warmed sweet potatoes which had been browned in syrup in the
Southern style, crisp buttered rolls, and a pot of steaming coffee were
on the large tray which Cynthia insisted on carrying to the living-room
door for her mistress. Burns, jumping up at sight of her, took the tray,
while Ellen cleared a small table, drew up a chair, and summoned the
young stranger.

The low bow he made her before he took the chair proclaimed his
breeding, as well as the smile of joy which showed the flash of his even
white teeth in the firelight. He made a little gesture of gratitude
toward both Burns and Ellen, pressing his hands over his heart and then
extending them, the expression on his face touching in its starved
restraint. Then he fell upon the food, and even though he was plainly
ravenous he ate as manneredly as any gentleman. Only by the way he
finished each tiniest crumb could they know his extremity.

"By Jove, that beats eating it myself, if I were hungry as a faster on
the third day!" Burns exclaimed, as he sat turned away from the
beneficiary, his eyes apparently upon the fire. Ellen, from behind the
boy, smiled at her husband, noting how completely his air of fatigue had
fallen from him. Often before she had observed how any call upon R.P.
Burns's sympathies rode down his own need of commiseration.

"Hungarian, I think, don't you?" Burns remarked, as the meal was
finished, and the youth rose to bow his thanks once more. This time
there was a response. He nodded violently, smiling and throwing out his
hands.

"_Ungahree_!" he said, and smiled and nodded again, and said again,
"_Ungahree_!"

"He knows that word all right," said Burns, smiling back. "It's a land
of musicians. The fiddle's a good one, I'll wager."

He glanced at it as he spoke, and the boy leaped for it, pressing it to
his breast. He began to tune it.

"He thinks we want to be paid for his supper," Ellen exclaimed. "Can't
you make him understand we should like him to rest first?"

"I'd only convey to him the idea that we didn't want to hear him play,
which would be a pity, for we do. If he's the musician he looks, by
those eyes and that mouth, we'll be more than paid. Go ahead,
Hungary--it'll make you happier than anything we could do for you."

Clearly it would. Burns carried out the tray, and when he returned his
guest was standing upon the hearth rug facing Ellen, his bow uplifted.
He waited till Burns had thrown himself down on the couch again in a
sitting posture, both arms stretched along the back. Then he made his
graceful obeisance again, and drew the bow very slowly and softly over
the first string. And, at the very first note, the two who were watching
him knew what was to come. It was in every line of him, that promise.

It might have been his gratitude that he was voicing, so touching were
the strains that followed that first note. The air was unfamiliar, but
it sounded like a folk song of his own country, and he put into it all
the poignant, peculiar melody of such a song. His tones were exquisite,
with the sure touch of the trained violinist inspired and supported by
the emotional understanding of the genuine musician.

When he had finished he stood looking downward for a moment, then as
Burns said "Bravo!" he smiled as if he understood the word, and lifted
his instrument again to his shoulder. This time his bow descended upon
the strings with a full note of triumph, and he burst into the brilliant
performance of a great masterpiece, playing with a spirit and dash which
seemed to transform him. Often his lips parted to show his white teeth,
often he swung his whole body into the rhythm of his music, until he
seemed a very part of the splendid harmonies he made. His thin cheeks
flushed, his hollow eyes grew bright, he smiled, he frowned, he shook
his slender shoulders, he even took a stride to right or left as he
played on, as if the passion of his performance would not let him rest.

His listeners watched him with sympathetic and comprehending interest.
Warmed and fed, his Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to
the exaltation of the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely
pathetic. Burns, even more ardently than his wife, responded to the
appeal. He no longer lounged among the pillows of the broad couch; he
sat erect, his eyes intent, his lips relaxed, his cares forgot. He was a
lover of music, as are many men of his profession, and he was more than
ordinarily susceptible to its influences. He drank in the tones of the
master, voiced by this devoted interpreter, like wine, and like wine
they brought the colour to his face also, and the light to his eyes.

"Jove!" he murmured, as the last note died away, "he's a wonder. He must
be older than he looks. How he loves it! He's forgotten that he doesn't
know where he's to sleep to-night--but, by all that's fair, _we_ know,
eh?"

Ellen smiled, with a look of assent. Her own heart was warmly touched.
There was a small bedroom upstairs, plainly but comfortably furnished,
which was often used for impecunious patients who needed to remain under
observation for a day or two. It was at the service of any chance guest,
and the chance guest was surely with them to-night. There was no place
in the village to which such a vagrant as this might be sent, except
the jail, and the jail, for a musician of such quality, was unthinkable.
And in the night and storm one would not turn a dog outdoors to hunt for
shelter--at least not Red Pepper Burns nor Ellen Burns, his wife.

As if he could not stop, now that he had found ears to listen, the young
Hungarian played on. More and more profoundly did his music move him,
until it seemed as if he had become the very spirit of the instrument
which sung and vibrated under his thin fingers.

"My word, Len, this is too good to keep all to ourselves. Let's have the
Macauleys and Chesters over. Then we'll have an excuse for paying the
chap a good sum for his work--and somehow I feel that we need an excuse
for such a gentleman as he is."

"That's just the thing. I'll ask them."

She was on her way to the telephone when her husband suddenly called
after her, "Wait a minute, Len." She turned back, to see the musician,
his bow faltering, suddenly lower his violin and lean against his
patron, who had leaped to his support. A minute later Burns had him
stretched upon the blue couch, and had laid his fingers on the bony
wrist.

"Hang me for a simpleton, to feed him like that he's probably not tasted
solid food for days. The reaction is too much, of course. He's been
playing on his nerve for the last ten minutes, and I, like an idiot,
thought it was his emotional temperament."

He ran out of the room and returned with a wine glass filled with
liquid, which he administered, his arm under the ragged shoulders. Then
he patted the wasted cheek, gone suddenly white except where the excited
colour still showed in faint patches.

"You'll be all right, son," he said, smiling down into the frightened
eyes, and his tone if not his words seemed to carry reassurance, for the
eyes closed with a weary flutter and the gripping fingers relaxed.

"He's completely done," Burns said pityingly. He took one hand in his
own and held it in his warm grasp, at which the white lids unclosed
again, and the sensitive lips tried to smile.

"I'd no business to let him play so long--I might have known. Poor boy,
he's starved for other things than food. Do you suppose anybody's held
his hand like this since he left the old country? He thought he'd find
wealth and fame in the new one--and this is what he found!"

Ellen stood looking at the pair--her brawny husband, himself "completely
done" an hour before, now sitting on the edge of the couch with his new
patient's hand in his, his face wearing an expression of keen interest,
not a sign of fatigue in his manner; the exhausted young foreigner in
his ragged clothing lying on the luxurious couch, his pale face standing
out like a fine cameo against the blue velvet of the pillow under his
dark head. If a thought of possible contamination for her home's
belongings entered her mind it found no lodgment there, so pitiful was
her heart.

"Is the room ready upstairs?" Burns asked presently, when he had again
noted the feeble action of the pulse under his fingers. "What he needs
is rest and sleep, and plenty of both. Like the most of us he's kept up
while he had to, and now he's gone to pieces absolutely. To-morrow we
can send him to the hospital, perhaps, but for to-night--"

"The room is ready. I sent Cynthia up at once."

"Bless you, you never fail me, do you? Well--we may as well be on our
way. He's nearly asleep now."

Burns stood up, throwing off his coat. But Ellen remonstrated.

"Dear, you are so tired to-night. Let me call Jim over to help you carry
him up."

A derisive laugh answered her. "Great Cæsar, Len! The chap's a mere bag
of bones--and if he were twice as heavy he'd be no weight for me. Jim
Macauley would howl at the idea, and no wonder. Go ahead and open the
doors, please, and I'll have him up in a jiffy."

He stooped over the couch, swung the slender figure up into his powerful
arms, speaking reassuringly to the eyes which slowly opened in
half-stupefied alarm. "It's all right, little Hungary. We're going to
put you to bed, like the small lost boy you are. Bring his fiddle,
Len--he won't want that out of his sight."

He strode away with his burden, and marched up the stairs as if he were
carrying his own two-year-old son. Arrived in the small, comfortable
little room at the back of the house he laid his charge on the bed, and
stood looking down at him.

"Len, I'll have to go the whole figure," he said--and said it not as if
the task he was about to impose upon himself were one that irked him.
"Get me hot water and soap and towels, will you? And an old pair of
pajamas. I can't put him to bed in his rags."

"Shall I send for Amy?" questioned his wife, quite as if she understood
the uselessness of remonstrance.

"Not much. Amy's making out bills for me to-night, we'll not interrupt
the good work. Put some bath-ammonia in the water, please--and have it
hot."

Half an hour later he called her in to see the work of his hands. She
had brought him one of his surgical aprons with the bath equipment. With
his sleeves rolled up, his apron well splashed, his coppery hair more or
less in disarray from the occasional thrustings of a soapy hand, and his
face flushed and eager like a healthy boy's, Red Pepper Burns stood
grinning down at his patient. Little Hungary lay in the clean white bed,
his pale face shining with soap and happiness, his arms upon the
coverlet encased in the blue and white sleeves of Burns's pajamas, the
sleeves neatly turned back to accommodate the shortness of his arms. The
workman turned to Ellen as she came in.

"Comfy, eh?" he observed briefly.

"Absolutely, I should say, poor dear."

"Ah, you wouldn't have called him that before the bath. But he is rather
a dear now, isn't he? And I think he's younger than I did downstairs.
Not over eighteen, at the most, but fully forty in the experiences and
hardships that have brought him here. Well, we'll go away and let him
rest. Wish I knew the Hungarian for 'good-night,' don't you? Anyway, if
he knows any prayers he'll say 'em, I'll venture."

The dark eyes were watching him intently as he spoke, as if their owner
longed to know what this kind angel in the form of a big American
stranger was saying to him. And when, in leaving him, Burns once more
laid an exploring touch upon his wrist, the two thin hands suddenly
clutched the strong one and bore it weakly to lips which kissed it
fervently.

"Well, that's rather an eloquent thank-you, eh?" murmured Burns, as he
patted the hands in reply. "No doubt but he's grateful. Put the fiddle
where he can see it in the morning, will you, honey? Open the window
pretty well: I've covered him thoroughly, and he has a touch of fever to
keep him warm. Good-night, little Hungary. Luck's with you to-night, to
get into this lady's house."

Downstairs by the fireside once more, the signs of his late occupation
removed, Burns stretched out an arm for his wife.

"Come sit beside me in the Retreat," he invited, using the name he had
long ago given to the luxurious blue couch where he was accustomed,
since his marriage, to rest and often to catch a needed nap. He drew the
winsome figure close within his arm, resting his red head against the
dark one below it. "I don't seem to feel particularly tired, now," he
observed. "Curious, isn't it? Fatigue, as I've often noticed, is more
mental than physical--with most of us. Your ditch-digger is tired in his
back and arms, but the ordinary person is merely tired because his mind
tells him he is."

"You are never too tired to rouse yourself for one patient more," was
Ellen's answer to this. "The last one seems to cure you of the one
before."

Burns's hearty laugh shook them both. "You can't make me out such an
enthusiast in my profession as that. I turned away two country calls
to-night--too lazy to make 'em."

"But you would have gone if they couldn't have found anybody else."

"That goes without saying--no merit in that. The ethics of the
profession have to be lived up to, curse 'em as we may, at times. Len,
how are we to get to know something about little Hungary upstairs? Those
eyes of his are going to follow me into my dreams to-night."

"I suppose there are Hungarians in town?"

"Not a one that I ever heard of. Plenty in the city, though. The waiter
at the Arcadia, where I get lunch when I'm at the hospital, is a Magyar.
By Jove, there's an idea! I'll bring Louis out, if Hungary can't get
into the hospital to-morrow--and I warn you he probably can't. I
shouldn't want him to take a twelve-mile ambulance ride in this weather.
That touch of fever may mean simple exhaustion, and it may mean look out
for pneumonia, after all the exposure he's had. I'd give something to
know how it came into his crazy head to stand and fiddle outside a
private house in a January storm. Why didn't he try a cigar shop or some
other warm spot where he could pass the hat? That's what Louis must find
out for me, eh? Len, that was great music of his, wasn't it? The fellow
ought to have a job in a hotel orchestra. Louis and I between us might
get him one."

Burns went to bed still working on this problem, and Ellen rejoiced that
it had superseded the anxieties of the past day. Next morning he was
early at the little foreigner's bedside, to find him resting quietly,
the fever gone, and only the intense fatigue remaining, the cure for
which was simply rest and food.

"Shall we let him stay till he's fit?" Burns asked his wife.

"Of course. Both Cynthia and Amy are much interested, and between them
he will have all he needs."

"And I'll bring Louis out, if I have to pay for a waiter to take his
place," promised Burns.

He was as good as his word. When he returned that afternoon from the
daily visit to the city hospital, where he had always many patients, he
brought with him in the powerful roadster which he drove himself a
dark-faced, pointed moustached countryman of little Hungary, who spoke
tolerable English, and was much pleased and flattered to be of service
to the big doctor whom he was accustomed to serve in his best manner.

Taken to the bedside, Louis gazed down at its occupant with
condescending but comprehending eyes, and spoke a few words which caused
the thin face on the pillow to break into smiles of delight, as the
eager lips answered in the same tongue. Question and answer followed in
quick succession and Louis was soon able to put Burns in possession of a
few significant facts.

"He say he come to dis countree October. Try find work New York--no
good. He start to valk to countree, find vork farm. Bad time. Seeck,
cold, hungree. Fear he spoil hands for veolinn--dat's vhy he not take
vork on road, vat he could get. He museecian--good one."

"Does he say that?" Burns asked, amused.

Louis nodded. "Many museecians in Hungary. Franz come from Budapest. No
poor museecians dere. Budapest great ceety--better Vienna, Berlin,
Leipsic--oh, yes! See, I ask heem."

He spoke to the boy again, evidently putting a meaning question, for
again the other responded with ardour, using his hands to emphasize his
assertion--for assertion it plainly was.

Louis laughed. "He say ze countree of Franz Liszt know no poor museeck.
He named for Franz Liszt. He play beeg museeck for you and ze ladee
last night. So?"

"He did--and took us off our feet. Tell him, will you?"

"He no un'erstand," laughed Louis, "eef I tell him 'off de feet.'"

"That's so--no American idioms yet for him, eh? Well, say he made us
very happy with his wonderful music. I'll wager that will get over to
him."

Plainly it did, to judge by the eloquence of Franz's eyes and his joyous
smile. With quick speech he responded.

"He say," reported Louis, "he vant to vork for you. No wagees till he
plees you. He do anyting. You van' heem?"

"Well, I'll have to think about that," Burns temporized. "But tell him
not to worry. We'll find a job before we let him go. He ought to play in
a restaurant or theatre, oughtn't he, Louis?"

Louis shook his head. "More men nor places," he said. "But ve see--ve
see."

"All right. Now ask him how he came to stand in front of my house in the
storm and fiddle."

To this Louis obtained a long reply, at which he first shook his head,
then nodded and laughed, with a rejoinder which brought a sudden rush of
tears to the black eyes below. Louis turned to Burns.

"He say man lead heem here, make heem stand by window, make sign to
heem to play. I tell heem man knew soft heart eenside."

To the edge of his coppery hair the blood rushed into the face of Red
Pepper Burns. Whether he would be angry or amused was for the moment an
even chance, as Ellen, watching him, understood. Then he shook his fist
with a laugh.

"Just wait till I catch that fellow!" he threatened. "A nice way out of
his own obligations to a starving fellow man."

He sent Louis back to town on the electric car line, with a round fee in
his pocket, and the instruction to leave no stone unturned to find Franz
work for his violin, himself promising to aid him in any plan he might
formulate.

In three days the young Hungarian was so far himself that Burns had him
downstairs to sit by the office fire, and a day more put him quite on
his feet. Careful search had discovered a temporary place for him in a
small hotel orchestra, whose second violin was ill, and Burns agreed to
take him into the city. The evening before he was to go, Ellen invited a
number of her friends and neighbours in to hear Franz play.

Dressed in a well-fitting suit of blue serge Franz looked a new being.
The suit had been contributed by Arthur Chester, Burns's neighbour and
good friend next door upon the right, and various other accessories had
been supplied by James Macauley, also Burns's neighbour and good friend
next door upon the left and the husband of Martha Macauley, Ellen's
sister. Even so soon the rest and good food had filled out the deepest
hollows in the emaciated cheeks, and happiness had lighted the sombre
eyes. Those eyes followed Burns about with the adoring gaze of a
faithful dog.

"It's evident you've attached one more devoted follower to your train,
Red," whispered Winifred Chester, in an interval of the violin playing.

"Well, he's a devotee worth having," answered Burns, watching his
protégé as Franz looked over a pile of music with Ellen, signifying his
pleasure every time they came upon familiar sheets. The two had found
common ground in their love of the most emotional of all the arts, and
Ellen had discovered rare delight in accompanying that ardent violin in
some of the scores both knew and loved.

"He's as handsome as a picture to-night, isn't he?" Winifred pursued.
"How Arthur's old blue suit transforms him. And wasn't it clever of
Ellen to have him wear that soft white shirt with the rolling collar and
flowing black tie? It gives him the real musician's look."

"Trust you women to work for dramatic effects," murmured Burns. "Here we
go--and I'll wager it'll be something particularly telling, judging by
the way they both look keyed up to it. Ellen plays like a virtuoso
herself to-night, doesn't she?"

"It's enough to inspire any one to have that fiddle at her shoulder,"
remarked James Macauley, who, hanging over the couch, had been listening
to this bit of talk.

The performance which followed captured them all, even practical and
energetic Martha Macauley, who had often avowed that she considered the
study of music a waste of time in a busy world.

"Though I think, after all," she observed to Arthur Chester, who lounged
by her side, revelling in the entertainment with the zest of the man who
would give his whole time to affairs like these if it were not necessary
for him to make a living at the practice of some more prosaic
profession, "it's quite as much the interest of having such a stagey
character performing for us as it is his music. Did you ever see any
human being throw his whole soul into anything like that? One couldn't
help but watch him if he weren't making a sound."

"It's certainly refreshing, in a world where we all try to cover up our
real feelings, to see anybody give himself away so naïvely as that,"
Chester replied. "But there's no doubt about the quality of his music.
He was born, not made. And, by George, Len certainly plays up to him. I
didn't know she had it in her, for all I've been admiring her
accomplishments for four years."

"Ellen's all temperament, anyway," said Ellen's sister.

Chester looked at her curiously. Martha was a fine-looking young woman,
in a very wholesome and clean-cut fashion. There was no feminine
artfulness in the way she bound her hair smoothly upon her head, none in
the plain cut of her simple evening attire, absolutely none in her
manner. Glancing from Martha to her sister, as he had often done before
in wonderment at the contrast between them, he noted as usual how
exquisitely Ellen was dressed, though quite as simply, in a way, as her
practical sister. But in every line of her smoke-blue silken frock was
the most subtle art, as Chester, who had a keen eye for such matters and
a fastidious taste, could readily recognize. From the crown of her dark
head to the toe of the blue slipper with which she pressed the pedal of
the great piano which she had brought from her old home in the South,
she was a picture to feast one's eyes upon.

"Give me temperament, then--and let some other fellow take the common
sense," mused Arthur Chester to himself. "Ellen has both, and Red's in
luck. It was a great day for him when the lovely young widow came his
way--and he knows it. What a home she makes him--what a home!"

His eyes roved about the beautiful living room, as they had often done
before. His own home, next door, was comfortable and more than
ordinarily attractive, but he knew of no spot in the town which
possessed the subtle charm of this in which he sat. His wife, Winifred,
was always trying to reproduce within their walls the indefinable
quality which belonged to everything Ellen touched, and always saying in
despair, "It's no use--Ellen is Ellen, and other people can't be like
her."

"Better let it go at that," her husband sometimes responded. "You're
good enough for me." Which was quite true, for Winifred Chester was a
peculiarly lovable young woman. He noted afresh to-night that beside
Martha Macauley's somewhat heavy good looks Winifred seemed a creature
of infinite and delightful variety.

Perhaps the music had made them all more or less analytic, for in an
interval James Macauley, comfortably ensconced in a great winged chair
for which he was accustomed to steer upon entering this room, where he
was nearly as much at home as within his own walls, remarked, "What is
there about music like that that sets you to thinking everybody in sight
is about the best ever?"

"Does it have that effect on you?" queried Burns, lazily, from the blue
couch. "That's a good thing for a fellow of a naturally critical
disposition."

"Critical, am I? Why, within a week I paid you the greatest compliment
in my power."

"Really!"

"If it hadn't been for me this company would never have been gathered,
to listen to these wondrous strains."

"How's that?" Burns turned on him a suddenly interested eye.

"Oh, I'm not telling. It's enough that the thing came about." Macauley
looked around for general approbation.

Red Pepper sat up. "It was you stood the poor beggar up under my window,
on that howling night, was it, Jim? I've been looking for the man that
did it."

"Why," said Macauley comfortably, "the chap asked me to point him to a
doctor's office--said he had a bit of a cold. I said you were the one
and only great and original M.D. upon earth, and as luck would have it
he was almost at your door. I said that if he didn't find you in he
should come over to my house and we would fix him up with cough drops.
He thanked me and passed on. As luck would have it you were in."

Red Pepper glared at him. A chuckle from Arthur Chester caused him to
turn his eyes that way. He scrutinized his guests in turn, and detected
signs of mirth. Winifred Chester's pretty shoulders were shaking. Martha
Macauley's lips were pressed close together. The others were all
smiling.

Burns turned upon Winifred, who sat nearest. "Tell me the truth about
this thing," he commanded.

She shook her head, but she got no peace until at length she gave him
the tale.

"Arthur and I were over at Jim's. He came in and said a wager was up
among some men outside as to whether if that poor boy came and fiddled
under your window you'd take him in and keep him over night. Somebody'd
been saying things against you, down street somewhere--" she hesitated,
glancing at her husband, who nodded, and said, "Go on--he'll have it out
of us now, anyhow."

"They said," she continued, "that you were the most brutal surgeon in
the State, and that you hadn't any heart. Some of them made this wager,
and they all sneaked up here behind the one that steered Franz to your
window."

Burns's quick colour had leaped to his face at this recital, as they
were all accustomed to see it, but for an instant he made no reply.
Winifred looked at him steadily, as one who was not afraid.

"We were all in a dark window watching. If you hadn't taken him in we
would. But--O Red! We knew--we knew that heart of yours."

"And who started that wager business?" Burns inquired, in a muffled
voice.

"Why, Jim, of course. Who else would take such a chance?"

"Was it a serious wager?"

"Of course it was."

"Even odds?"

"No, it was Jim against the crowd. And for a ridiculously high stake."

Red Pepper glared at James Macauley once more. "You old pirate!" he
growled. "How dared you take such a chance on me? And when you know I'm
death on that gambling propensity of yours?"

"I know you are," replied Macauley, with a satisfied grin. "And you know
perfectly well I haven't staked a red copper for a year. But that sort
of talk I overheard was too much for me. Besides, I ran no possible risk
for my money. I was betting on a sure thing."

Burns got up, amidst the affectionate laughter which followed this
explanation, and walked over to where Franz stood, his eager eyes fixed
upon his new and adored friend, who, he somehow divined, was the target
for some sort of badinage.

"Little Hungary," he said, smiling into the uplifted, boyish face, with
his hand on the slender shoulder, "it came out all right that time, but
don't you ever play under my window again in a January blizzard. If you
do, I'll kick you out into the storm!"




CHAPTER III

ANNE LINTON'S TEMPERATURE


"Is Doctor Burns in?"

"He's not in. He will be here from two till five this afternoon. Could
you come then?" Miss Mathewson regarded the young stranger at the door
with more than ordinary interest. The face which was lifted to her was
one of quite unusual beauty, with astonishing eyes under resolute dark
brows, though the hair which showed from under the small and
close-fitting hat of black was of a wonderful and contradictory colour.
It was almost the shade, it occurred to Amy Mathewson, of that which
thatched the head of Red Pepper Burns himself, but it was more
picturesque hair than his, finer of texture, with a hint of curl. The
mass of it which showed at the back as the stranger turned her head away
for a moment, evidently hesitating over her next course of action, had
in it tints of bronze which were more beautiful than Burns's coppery
hues.

"Would you care to wait?" inquired Miss Mathewson, entirely against her
own principles.

It was not quite one o'clock, and Burns always lunched in the city,
after his morning at the hospital, and reached home barely in time for
those afternoon village office hours which began at two. His assistant
did not as a rule encourage the arrival of patients in the office as
early as this, knowing that they were apt to become impatient and
aggrieved by their long wait. But something about the slightly drooping
figure of the girl before her, in her black clothes, with a small
handbag on her arm, and a look of appeal on her face, suggested to the
experienced nurse that here was a patient who must not be turned away.

The girl looked up eagerly. "If I might," she said in a tone of relief.
"I really have nowhere to go until I have seen the Doctor."

Miss Mathewson led her in and gave her the most comfortable chair in the
room, a big, half shabby leather armchair, near the fireplace and close
beside a broad table whereon the latest current magazines were arranged
in orderly piles. The girl sank into the chair as if its wide arms were
welcome after a weary morning. She looked up at Miss Mathewson with a
faint little smile.

"I haven't been sitting much to-day," she said.

"This first spring weather makes every one feel rather tired," replied
Amy, noting how heavy were the shadows under the brown eyes with their
almost black lashes--an unusual combination with the undeniably russet
hair.

From her seat at the desk, where she was posting Burns's day book, the
nurse observed without seeming to do so that the slim figure in the old
armchair sat absolutely without moving, except once when the head
resting against the worn leather turned so that the cheek lay next it.
And after a very short time Miss Mathewson realized that the waiting
patient had fallen asleep. She studied her then, for something about the
young stranger had aroused her interest.

The girl was obviously poor, for the black suit, though carefully
pressed, was of cheap material, the velvet on the small black hat had
been caught in more than one shower, and the black gloves had been many
times painstakingly mended. The small feet alone showed that their owner
had allowed herself one luxury, that of good shoes--and the daintiness
of those feet made a strong appeal to the observer.

As for the face resting against the chair back, it was flushed after a
fashion which suggested illness rather than health, and Miss Mathewson
realized presently that the respiration of the sleeper was not quite
what it should be. Whether this were due to fatigue or coming illness
she could not tell.

Half-past one! The first early caller was slowing a small motor at the
curb outside when Amy Mathewson gently touched the girl's arm. "Come
into the other room, please," she said.

The brown eyes opened languidly. The black-gloved hand clutched at the
handbag, and the girl rose. "I'm so sorry," she murmured. "I don't know
how I came to go to sleep."

"You were tired out. If I had known I should have brought you in here
before," Amy said, leading her into the consulting room. "It is still
half an hour before Doctor Burns will be in, and you must lie here on
his couch while you wait."

"Oh, thank you, but I ought not to go to sleep. I--have you just a
minute to spare? I should like to show you a little book I am selling--"

Miss Mathewson suffered a sudden revulsion of feeling. So this girl was
only a book agent. First on the list of what by two o'clock would be a
good-sized assemblage of waiting patients, she must not be allowed to
take Doctor Burns's time to exploit her wares. Yet, even as Amy
regretted having brought a book agent into this inner sanctum, the girl
looked up from searching in her handbag and seemed to recognize the
prejudice she had excited.

"Oh, but I'm a patient, too," she said with a little smile. "I didn't
expect to take the Doctor's time telling him about the book. But you--I
thought you might be interested. It's a little book of bedtime stories
for children. They are very jolly little tales. Would you care to see
it?"

Now Amy Mathewson was the fortunate or unfortunate--as you happen to
regard such things--possessor of a particularly warm heart, and the
result of this appeal was that she took the book away with her into the
outer office, promising to look it over if the seller of it would lie
down upon the couch and rest quietly. She was convinced that the girl
was much more than weary--she was very far from well. The revealing
light of that consulting room had struck upon the upturned face and had
shown Miss Mathewson's trained eyes certain signs which alarmed her.

So it came about that Red Pepper Burns, coming in ruddy from his
twelve-mile dash home, and feeling particularly fit for the labours of
the afternoon in consequence of having found every hospital patient of
his own on the road to recovery--two of them having taken a
right-about-face from a condition which the day before had pointed
toward trouble--discovered his first office patient lying fast asleep
upon the consulting room couch.

"She seemed so worn out I put her here," explained Miss Mathewson,
standing beside him. "She falls asleep the moment she is off her feet."

"Hm--m," was his reply as he thrust his arms into his white
office-jacket. "Well, best wake her up, though it seems a pity. Looks as
if she'd been on a hunger strike, eh?" he added under his breath.

Miss Mathewson had the girl awake again in a minute, and she sat up, an
expression of contrition crossing her face as she caught sight of the
big doctor at the other side of the room, his back toward her. When
Burns turned, at Amy's summons, he beheld the slim figure sitting
straight on the edge of the broad couch, the brown eyes fixed on him.

"Tired out?" he asked pleasantly. "Take this chair, please, so I can see
all you have to tell me--and a few things you don't tell me."

It did not take him long. His eyes on the face which was too flushed,
his fingers on the pulse which beat too fast, his thermometer
registering a temperature too high, all told him that here was work for
him. The questions he asked brought replies which confirmed his fears.
Nothing in his manner indicated, however, that he was doing considerable
quick thinking. His examination over, he sat back in his chair and began
a second series of questions, speaking in a more than ordinarily quiet
but cheerful way.

"Will you tell me just a bit about your personal affairs?" he asked. "I
understand that you come from some distance. Have you a home and
family?"

"No family--for the last two years, since my father died."

"And no home?"

"If I am ill, Doctor Burns, I will look after myself."

He studied her. The brown eyes met the scrutinizing hazel ones without
flinching. Whether or not the spirit flinched he could not be sure. The
hazel eyes were very kindly.

"You have relatives somewhere whom we might let know of this?"

She shook her head determinedly. Her head lifted ever so little.

"You are quite alone in the world?"

"For all present purposes--yes, Doctor Burns."

"I can't just believe," he said gently, "that it is not very important
to somebody to know if you are ill."

"It is just my affair," she answered with equal courtesy of manner but
no less finally. "Believe me, please--and tell me what to do. Shall I
not be better to-morrow--or in a day or two?"

He was silent for a moment. Then, "It is not a time for you to be
without friends," said Red Pepper Burns. "I will prove to you that you
have them at hand. After that you will find there are others. I am
going to take you to a pleasant place I know of, where you will have
nothing to do but to lie still and rest and get well. The best of nurses
will look after you. You will obey orders for a little--my orders, if
you want to trust me--"

"Where is this place?" The question was a little breathless.

"Where do you guess?"

"In--a hospital?"

"In one of the best in the world."

"I am--pretty ill then?"

"It's a bit of a wonder," said Burns in his quietest tone, "how you have
kept around these last four days. I wish you hadn't."

"If I hadn't," said the girl rather faintly, "I shouldn't have been in
this town and I shouldn't have come to Doctor Burns. So--I'm glad I
did."

"Good!" said Burns, smiling. "It's fine to start with the confidence of
one's patient. I'm glad you're going to trust me. Now we'll take you to
another room where you can lie down again till my office hours are over
and I can run into the city with you."

He rose, beckoning. But his patient protested: "Please tell me how to
get there. I can go perfectly well. My head is better, I think."

"That's lucky. But the first of my orders Miss Linton, is that you come
with me now."

He summoned Miss Mathewson, gave her directions, and dismissed the two.
In ten minutes the heavy eyes were again closed, while their owner lay
motionless again upon a bed in an inner room which was often used for
such purposes.

"I'm sorry I can't take her in now," Burns said to Amy presently in an
interval between patients. "I don't want to call the ambulance out here
for a walking case, and there's no need of startling her with it,
anyhow. I wish I had some way to send her."

"Mr. Jordan King just came into the office. His car is outside. Couldn't
he take her in?"

"Of course he could--and would, I've no doubt. He's only after his
mother's prescription. Send him in here next, will you, please?"

To the tall, well-built, black-eyed young man who answered this summons
in some surprise at being admitted before his turn, Burns spoke crisply:

"Here's the prescription, Jord, and you'll have to take it to Wood's to
get it filled. I hope it'll do your mother a lot of good, but I'm not
promising till I've tried it out pretty well. Now will you do me a
favour?"

"Anything you like, Doctor."

"Thanks. I'm sending a patient to the hospital--a stranger stranded here
ill. She ought not to be out of bed another hour, though she walked to
the office and would walk away again if I'd let her--which I won't. I
can't get off for three hours yet. Will you take her in to the Good
Samaritan for me? I'll telephone ahead, and some one will meet her at
the door. All right?"

He looked up. Jordan King--young civil engineer of rising reputation in
spite of the family wealth which would have made him independent of his
own exertions, if he could possibly have been induced by an adoring,
widowed mother to remain under her wing--stood watching him with a smile
on his character-betraying lips.

"You ought to have an executive position of some sort, Doctor Burns," he
observed, "you're so strong on orders. I've got mine. Where's the lady?
Do I have to be silent or talkative? Is she to have pillows? Am I to
help her out?"

"She'll walk out--but that and the walk in will be the last she'll take
for some time. Talk as much as you like; it'll help her to forget that
she's alone in the world at present except for us. Go out to your car;
I'll send her out with Miss Mathewson."

Burns turned to his desk, and King obediently went out. Five minutes
later, as he stood waiting beside his car, a fine but hard-used roadster
of impressive lines and plenty of power, the office nurse and her
patient emerged. King noted in some surprise the slender young figure,
the interest-compelling face with its too vivid colour in cheeks that
looked as if ordinarily they were white, the apparel which indicated
lack of means, though the bearing of the wearer unmistakably suggested
social training.

"I thought she'd be an elderly one somehow," he said in congratulation
of himself. "Jolly, what hair! Poor little girl; she does look sick--but
plucky. Hope I can get her in all right."

Outwardly he was the picture of respectful attention as Miss Mathewson
presented him, calling the girl "Miss Linton," and bidding him wrap her
warmly against the spring wind.

"I'll take the best care of her I know," he promised with a friendly
smile. He tucked a warm rug around her, taking special pains with her
small feet, whose well-chosen covering he did not fail to note. "All
right?" he asked as he finished.

"Very comfortable, thank you. It's ever so kind of you."

"Glad to do anything for Doctor Burns," King responded, taking his place
beside her. "Now shall we go fast or slow?"

"Just as you like, please. I don't feel very ill just now, and this air
is so good on my face."




CHAPTER IV

TWO RED HEADS


Jordan King set his own speed in the powerful roadster, reflecting that
Miss Linton, to judge from her worn black clothes, was probably not
accustomed to motoring and so making the pace a moderate one. Fast or
slow, it would not take long to cover the twelve miles over the
macadamized road to the hospital in the city, and if it was to be her
last bath in the good outdoors for some time, as the doctor had
said--King drew a long breath, filling his own sturdy lungs with the
balmy yet potent April air, feeling very sorry for the unknown little
person by his side.

"Would you rather I didn't talk?" he inquired when a mile or two had
been covered in silence.

She lifted her eyes to his, and for the first time he got a good look
into them. They were very wonderful eyes, and none the less wonderful
because of the fever which made them almost uncannily brilliant between
their dark lashes.

"Oh, I wish you would talk, if you don't mind!" she answered--and he
noted as he had at first how warmly pleasant were the tones of her
voice, which was a bit deeper than one would have expected. "I've heard
nobody talk for days--except to say they didn't care to buy my book."

"Your book? Have you written a book?"

"I'm selling one." This astonished him, but he did not let it show. It
was certainly enough to make any girl ill to have to go about selling
books. He wondered how it happened. She opened her handbag and took out
the small book. "I don't want to sell you one," she said. "You wouldn't
have any use for it. It's a little set of stories for children."

"But I do want to buy one," he protested. "I've a lot of nieces and
nephews always coming at me for stories."

She shook her head. "You can't buy one. I'd like to give you one if you
would take it, to show you how I appreciate this beautiful drive."

"Of course I'll take it," he said quickly, "and delighted at the
chance." He slipped the book into his pocket. "As for the drive, it's
much jollier not to be covering the ground alone. I wish, though--" and
he stopped, feeling that he was probably going to say the wrong thing.

She seemed to know what it would have been. "You're sorry to be taking
me to the hospital?" she suggested. "You needn't be. I didn't want to
go, just at first, but then--I felt I could trust the Doctor. He was so
kind, and his hair was so like mine, he seemed like a sort of big older
brother."

"Red Pepper Burns seems like that to a lot of people, including myself.
I don't look like much of a candidate for illness, but I've had an
accident or two, and he's pulled me through in great shape. You're right
in trusting him and you can keep right on, to the last ditch--" He
stopped short again, with an inward thrust at himself for being so
blundering in his suggestions to this girl, who, for all he knew, might
be on her way to that "last ditch" from which not even Burns could save
her.

But the girl herself seemed to have paused at his first phrase. "What
did you call the Doctor?" she asked, turning her eyes upon him again.

"What did I--oh! 'Red Pepper.' Yes--I've no business to call him that,
of course, and I don't to his face, though his friends who are a bit
older than I usually do, and people speak of him that way. It's his
hair, of course--and--well, he has rather a quick temper. People with
that coloured hair--But you're wrong in saying yours is like his," he
added quickly.

For the first time he saw a smile touch her lips. "So he has a quick
temper," she mused. "I'm glad of that--I have one myself. It goes with
the hair surely enough."

"It goes with some other things," ventured Jordan King, determined, if
he made any more mistakes, to make them on the side of encouragement.
"Pluck, and endurance, and keeping jolly when you don't feel so--if you
don't mind my saying it."

"One has to have a few of those things to start out into the world
with," said Miss Linton slowly, looking straight ahead again.

"One certainly does. Doctor Burns understands that as well as any man I
know. And he likes to find those things in other people." Then with
tales of some of the Doctor's experiences which young King had heard he
beguiled the way; and by the time he had told Miss Linton a story or two
about certain experiences of his own in the Rockies, the car was
approaching the city. Presently they were drawing up before the group of
wide-porched, long buildings, not unattractive in aspect, which formed
the hospital known as the Good Samaritan.

"It's a pretty good place," announced King in a matter-of-fact way,
though inwardly he was suffering a decided pang of sympathy for the
young stranger he was to leave within its walls. "And the Doctor said
he'd have some one meet us who knew all about you, so there'd be no
fuss."

He leaped out and came around to her side. She began to thank him once
more, but he cut her short. "I'm going in with you, if I may," he said.
"Something might go wrong about their understanding, and I could save
you a bit of bother."

She made no objection, and he helped her out. He kept his hand under her
arm as they went up the steps, and did not let her go until they were in
a small reception room, where they were asked to wait for a minute. He
realized now more than he had done before her weakness and the sense of
loneliness that was upon her. He stood beside her, hat in hand, wishing
he had some right to let her know more definitely than he had ventured
to do how sorry he was for her, and how she could count on his thinking
about her as a brother might while she was within these walls.

But Burns's message evidently had taken effect, as his messages usually
did, for after a very brief wait two figures in uniform appeared, one
showing the commanding presence of a person in authority, the other
wearing the pleasantly efficient aspect of the active nurse. Miss Linton
was to be taken to her room at once, the necessary procedure for
admittance being attended to later.

Miss Linton seemed to know something about hospitals, for she offered
instant remonstrance. "It's a mistake, I think," she said, lifting her
head as if it were very heavy, but speaking firmly. "I prefer not to
have a room. Please put me in your least expensive ward."

The person in authority smiled. "Doctor Burns said room," she returned.
"Nobody here is accustomed to dispute Doctor Burns's orders."

"But I must dispute them," persisted the girl. "I am not--willing--to
take a room."

"Don't concern yourself about that now," said the other. "You can settle
it with the Doctor when he comes by and by."

Jordan King inwardly chuckled. "I wonder if it's going to be a case of
two red heads," he said to himself. "I'll bet on R.P."

The nurse put her arm through Miss Linton's. "Come," she said gently.
"You ought not to be standing."

The girl turned to King, and put out her small hand in its mended glove.
He grasped it and dared to give it a strong pressure, and to say in a
low tone: "It'll be all right, you know. Keep a stiff upper lip. We're
not going to forget you." He very nearly said "I."

"Good-bye," she said. "I shall not forget how kind you've been."

Then she was gone through the big door, the tall nurse beside her
supporting steps which seemed suddenly to falter, and King was staring
after her, feeling his heart contract with sympathy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four hours later Anne Linton opened her eyes, after an interval of
unconsciousness which had seemed to the nurse who looked in now and then
less like a sleep than a stupor, to find a pair of broad shoulders
within her immediate horizon, and to feel the same lightly firm pressure
on her wrist that she had felt before that afternoon. She looked up
slowly into Burns's eyes.

"Not so bad, is it?" said his low and reassuring voice. "Bed more
comfortable than doctor's office chairs? Won't mind if you don't ring
any door bells to-morrow? Just let everything go and don't worry--and
you'll be all right."

"This room--" began the weary young voice--she was really much more
weary now that she had stopped trying to keep up than seemed at all
reasonable--"I can't possibly--"

"It's just the place for you. Don't do any thinking on that point. You
know you agreed to take my orders, and this is one of them."

"But I can't possibly--"

"I said they were my orders," repeated Burns. "But that was a
misstatement. They're the orders of some one else, more powerful than I
am under this roof--and that's saying something, I assure you. I think
you'll have to meet my wife. She's come on purpose to see you. She was
away when you were at the office."

He beckoned, and another figure moved quietly into range of the brown
eyes which were smoldering with the first advances of the fever. This
figure came around to the other side of the narrow high bed and sat down
beside it. Miss Linton looked into the face, as it seemed to her, of one
of the most attractive women she had ever seen. It was a face which
looked down at her with the sweetest sympathy in its expression, and yet
with that same high cheer which was in the face of the man on the other
side of the bed.

"My dear little girl," said a low, rich voice, "this is my room, and I
often have the pleasure of seeing my special friends use it. And I come
to see them here. When you are getting well, as you will be by and by, I
can have much nicer talks with you than if you were in a ward. Now that
you understand, you will let me have my way?".

The burning brown eyes looked into the soft black ones for a full
minute, then, with a long-drawn breath, the tense expression in the
stranger's relaxed. "I see," said the weary voice. "You are used to
having your way--just as he is. I'll have to let you because I haven't
any strength left to fight with. You are wonderfully kind. But--I'm not
a little girl."

Ellen Burns smiled. "We'll play you are, for a while," she said. "And--I
want you to know that, little or big, you are my friend. So now you have
both Doctor Burns and me, and you are not alone any more."

The heavy lashes closed over the brown eyes, and the lids were held
tightly shut as if to keep tears back. Seeing this, Ellen rose.

"Red," she said, "are you going to let us have Miss Arden?"

"Won't anybody else do?"

"Do you need her badly somewhere else?"

"If there were ten of her I could use them all!" declared her husband
emphatically.

"Nevertheless--"

Red Pepper Burns got up. He summoned a nurse waiting just outside the
door. "Please send Miss Arden here for a minute," he requested. Then he
turned back. "Are you satisfied with your power?" he asked his wife.

She nodded. "Quite. But I think you feel, as I do, that this is one of
the ten places where she will be better than another."

"She's a wonder, all right."

The patient in the bed presently was bidden to look at her new nurse,
one who was to take care of her much of the time. She lifted her heavy
eyes unwillingly, then she drew another deep breath of relief. "I would
rather have you," she murmured to the serene brow, the kind eyes, the
gently smiling lips of the girl who stood beside her.

"There's a tribute," laughed Burns softly. "They all feel like that when
they look at you, Selina. And what Mrs. Burns wants she usually gets.
You may special this case to-night, if you are ready to begin night duty
again."

"I am quite ready," said Miss Arden.

Burns turned to the bed again. "You are in the best hands we have to
give you," he said. "You are to trust everything to those hands.
Good-night. I'll see you in the morning."

"Good-night, dear," whispered Mrs. Burns, bending for an instant over
the bed.

"Oh you angels!" murmured the girl as they left her, her eyes following
them.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was ten days later, in the middle of a wonderful night in early May,
that Miss Arden, beginning to be sure that the case which had interested
her so much was going to give her a hard time before it should be
through, listened to words which roused in her deeper wonder than she
had yet felt for the most unusual patient she had had in a long time.
Although there was as yet nothing that could be called real delirium, a
tendency to talk in a light-headed sort of way was becoming noticeable.
Sitting by the window, the one light in the room deeply shaded, she
heard the voice suddenly say:

     "This evens things up a little, doesn't it? I know a little
     more about it now--you must realize that, if you are keeping
     track of me--and I know you are--you would--even from another
     world. Things aren't fair--they aren't. That you should have
     to suffer all you did, to bring you to that pass--while I--But
     I know a good deal about it now--really I do. And I'm going to
     know more. I didn't sell a single book to-day. You had lots of
     such days, didn't you?
     Poor--pale--tired--heartsick--heartbroken girl!"

A little mirthless laugh sounded from the bed. "I wonder how many people
ever let a person who is selling something at the door get into the
house. And if they let her in, do they ever, _ever_ ask her to sit down?
The places where I've stood, telling them about the book, while they
were telling me they didn't want it--stood and stood--and stood--with
great easy chairs in sight! Oh, that chair in my doctor's office--it was
the first chair I'd sat in that whole morning. I went to sleep in it, I
think."

There followed a long silence, as if the thought of sleep had brought
it on. But then the rambling talk began again.

     "His hair is red--red, like mine. I think that's why his heart
     is so warm. Yet her heart is warm, too, and her hair is almost
     black. The other man's hair was pretty dark, too, and his
     heart seemed--well, not exactly cold. Did he send me some
     daffodils the other day? I can't seem to remember. It seems as
     if I had seen some--pretty things--lovely, springy things.
     Perhaps Mrs.--the red-headed doctor's wife--queer I can't
     think of their names--perhaps she sent them. It would be like
     her."

The nurse's glance wandered, in the faint light, to where a great jar of
daffodils stood upon the farther window sill, their heads nodding
faintly in the night breeze. Jordan King's card, which had come with
them, was tucked away in a drawer near by with two other cards, bearing
the same name, which had accompanied other flowers. Miss Arden doubted
if her patient realized who had sent any of them. Afterward--if there
was to be an afterward--she would show the cards to her. Miss Arden,
like many other people, knew Jordan King by reputation, for the family
was an old and established one in the city, and the early success of the
youngest son in a line not often taken up by the sons of such families
was noteworthy. Also he was good to look at, and Miss Arden,
experienced nurse though she was and devoted to her profession, had not
lost her appreciation of youth and health and good looks in those who
were not her patients.

Unexpectedly, at this hour of the night--it was well toward one
o'clock--the door suddenly opened very quietly and a familiar big figure
entered. Springing up to meet Doctor Burns, Miss Arden showed no
surprise. It was a common thing for this man, summoned to the hospital
at unholy hours for some critical case, to take time to look in on
another patient not technically in need of him.

The head on the pillow turned at the slight sound beside it. Two wide
eyes stared up at Burns. "You've made a mistake, I think," said the
patient's voice, politely yet firmly. "My doctor has red hair. I know
him by that. Your hair is black."

"I presume it is, in this light," responded Burns, sitting down by the
bed. "It's pretty red, though, by daylight. In that case will you let me
stay a minute?" His fingers pressed the pulse. Then his hand closed over
hers with a quieting touch. "Since you're awake," he said, "you may as
well have one extra bath to send you back to sleep."

The head on the pillow signified unwillingness. "I'd take one to please
my red-headed doctor, but not you."

"You'd do anything for him, eh?" questioned Burns, his eyes on the chart
which the nurse had brought him and upon which she was throwing the
light of a small flash. "Well, you see he wants you to have this bath;
he told me so."

"Very well, then," she said with a sigh. "But I don't like them. They
make me shiver."

"I know it. But they're good for you. They keep your red-headed doctor
master of the situation. You want him to be that, don't you?"

"He'd be that anyway," said she confidently.

Burns smiled, but the smile faded quickly. He gave a few brief
directions, then slipped away as quietly as he had come.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was well into the next week when one morning he encountered Jordan
King, who had been out of town for several days. King came up to him
eagerly. Since this meeting occurred just outside the hospital, where
Burns's car had been standing in its accustomed place for the last hour,
it might not have been a wholly accidental encounter.

King made no attempt to maneuver for information. Maneuvering with Red
Pepper Burns, as the young man was well aware, seldom served any
purpose but to subject the artful one to a straight exposure. He asked
his question abruptly.

"I want to hear how Miss Linton is doing. I'm just back from
Washington--haven't heard for a week."

Burns frowned. No physician likes to be questioned about his cases,
particularly if they are not progressing to suit him. But he answered,
in a sort of growl: "She's not doing."

King looked startled. "You mean--not doing well?"

"She's fighting for existence--and--slipping."

"But--you haven't given her up?"

Burns exploded with instant wrath. King might have known that question
would make him explode. "Given her up! Don't you know a red-headed fiend
like me better than that?"

"I know you're a bulldog when you get your teeth in," admitted Jordan
King, looking decidedly unhappy and anxious. "If I'm just sure you've
got 'em in, that's enough."

Burns grunted. The sound was significant.

King ventured one more question, though Red Pepper's foot was on his
starter, and the engine had caught the spark and turned over. "If
there's anything I could do," he offered hurriedly and earnestly.
"Supply a special nurse, or anything--"

Burns shook his head. "Two specials now, and half the staff interested.
It's up to Anne Linton and nobody else. If she can do the trick--she and
Nature--all right. If not--well--Thanks for letting go the car, Jord.
This happens to be my busy day."

Jordan King looked after him, his heart uncomfortably heavy. Then he
stepped into his own car and drove away, taking his course down a side
street from which he could get a view of certain windows. They were wide
open to the May breeze and the sunshine, but no pots of daffodils or
other flowers stood on their empty sills. He knew it was useless to send
them now.

"But if she does pull through," he said to himself between his teeth,
"I'll bring her such an armful of roses she can't see over the top of
'em. God send I get the chance!"




CHAPTER V

SUSQUEHANNA


Red Pepper Burns drove into the vine-covered old red barn behind his
house which served as his garage, and stopped his engine with an air of
finality.

"Johnny," said he, addressing the young man who was accustomed to drive
with him--and for him when for any reason he preferred not to drive
himself, which was seldom--and who kept the car in the most careful
trim, "not for man or beast, angel or devil will I go out again
to-night."

Johnny Carruthers grinned. "No, sir," he replied. "Not unless they
happen to want you," he added.

"Not if they offer me a thousand dollars for the trip," growled his
master.

"You would for a dead beat, though," suggested the devoted servant, who
by virtue of five years of service knew whereof he spoke, "if he'd
smashed his good-for-nothin' head."

"Not if he'd smashed his whole blamed body--so long as there was
another surgeon in the county who could do the job."

"That's just the trouble," argued Johnny. "You'd think there wasn't."

Red Pepper looked at him. "Johnny, you're an idiot!" he informed him.
Then he strode away toward the house.

As he went into his office the telephone rang. The office was empty, for
it was dinner-time, and Miss Mathewson was having a day off duty on
account of her mother's illness. So, unhappily for the person at the
other end of the wire, the Doctor himself answered the ring. It had been
a hard day, following other hard days, and he was feeling intense
fatigue, devastating depression, and that unreasoning irritability which
is born of physical weariness and mental unrest.

"Hello," shouted the victim of these disorders into the transmitter.
"What?... No, I can't.... What?... No. Get somebody else.... What?... I
can't, I say.... Yes, you can. Plenty of 'em.... What?... Absolutely
_no_! Good-bye!"

"I ought to feel better after that," muttered Burns, slamming the
receiver on the hook. "But somehow I don't."

In two minutes he was splashing in a hot bath, as always at the end of a
busy day. From the tub he was summoned to the telephone, the upstairs
extension, in his own dressing room. With every red hair erect upon his
head after violent towelling, he answered the message which reached his
unwilling ears.

"What's that? Worse? She isn't--it's all in her mind. Tell her she's all
right. I saw her an hour ago. What?... Well, that's all imagination, as
I've told her ten thousand times. There's absolutely nothing the matter
with her heart.... No, I'm not coming--she's not to be babied like
that.... No, I won't. Good-bye!"

The door of the room softly opened. A knock had preceded the entrance of
Ellen, but Burns hadn't heard it. He eyed her defiantly.

"Do you feel much, much happier now?" she asked with a merry look.

"If I don't it's not the fault of the escape valve. I pulled it wide
open."

"I heard the noise of the escaping steam." She came close and stood
beside him, where he sat, half dressed and ruddy in his bathrobe. He put
up both arms and held her, lifting his head for her kiss, which he
returned with interest.

"That's the first nice thing that's happened to me to-day--since the one
I had when I left you this morning," he remarked. "I'm all in to-night,
and ugly as a bear, as usual. I feel better, just this minute, with you
in my arms and a bath to the good, but I'm a beast just the same, and
you'd best take warning.... Oh, the--"

For the telephone bell was ringing again. From the way he strode across
the floor in his bathrobe and slippers it was small wonder that the
walls trembled. His wife, watching him, felt a thrill of sympathy for
the unfortunate who was to get the full force of that concussion. With a
scowl on his brow he lifted the receiver, and his preliminary "Hello!"
was his deepest-throated growl. But then the scene changed. Red Pepper
listened, the scowl giving place to an expression of a very different
character. He asked a quick question or two, with something like a most
unaccustomed breathlessness in his voice, and then he said, in the
businesslike but kind way which characterized him when his sympathies
were roused:

"I'll be there as quick as I can get there. Call Doctor Buller for me,
and let Doctor Grayson know I may want him."

Rushing at the completion of his dressing he gave a hurried explanation,
in answer to his wife's anxious inquiry, "It isn't Anne Linton?"

"It's worse, it's Jord King. He's had a bad accident--confound his
recklessness! I'm afraid he's made a mess of it this time for fair,
though I can't be sure till I get there."

"Where is he?" Ellen's face had turned pale.

"At the hospital. His man Aleck is hurt, too. Call Johnny, please, and
have him bring the car around and go with me."

Ellen flew, and five minutes later watched her husband gulp down a cup
of the strong coffee Cynthia always made him at such crises when, in
spite of fatigue, he must lose no time nor adequately reënforce his
physical energy with food.

"Oh, I'm so sorry you couldn't rest to-night," she said as he set down
the cup and, pulling his hat over his eyes, picked up the heavy surgical
bags.

"Couldn't, anyway, with the universe on my mind, so I might as well keep
going," was Burns's gruff reply, though the kiss he left on her lips was
a long one and spoke his appreciation of her tender comradeship.

She did not see him again till morning, though she lay awake many hours.
He came in at daylight; she heard the car go in at the driveway, and,
rising hurriedly, was ready to meet him when he came into the living
room downstairs.

"Up so early?" questioned Burns as he saw her. The next minute he had
folded her in one of those strong-armed embraces which speak of a glad
return to one whose life is a part of one's own. "I wonder," he
murmured, with his cheek pressed to hers, "if a man ever came back to
sweeter arms than these!"

But she knew, in spite of this greeting, that his heart was heavy. Her
own heart sank. But she waited, asking no questions. He would tell her
when he was ready.

He drew her down upon the couch beside him and sat with his arm around
her. "No, I don't want to lie down just yet," he said. "I just want you.
I'm keeping you in suspense, I know; I oughtn't to do that. Jord's life
is all right, and he'll be himself again in time, but--well, I've lost
my nerve for a bit--I can't talk about it."

His voice broke. By and by it steadied again; and, his weariness
partially lifted by the heartening little breakfast Ellen brought him on
a tray, he told her the story of the night:

"Jord was coming in from the Coldtown Waterworks, forty miles out, late
for dinner and hustling to make up time. Aleck, the Kings' chauffeur,
was with him. They were coming in at a good clip, even for a back
street, probably twenty-five or thirty. There wasn't much on the street
except ahead, by the curb, a wagon, and coming toward him a big motor
truck. When he was fifty feet from the wagon a fellow stepped out from
behind it to cross the street. It was right under the arc light, and
Jord recognized Franz--'Little Hungary' you know--with his fiddle under
his arm, crossing to go in at the stage door of the Victoria Theatre,
where he plays. The boy didn't see them at all.

"Neither Jord nor Aleck can tell much about it yet, of course, but from
the little I got I know as well as if I had been there what happened. He
slammed on the brakes--it was the only thing he could do, with the motor
truck taking up half the narrow street. The pavement was wet--a shower
was just over. Of course she skidded completely around to the left, just
missing the truck, and when she hit the curb over she went. She jammed
Jord between the car and the ground, injuring his back pretty badly but
not permanently, as nearly as I can make out. But she crushed Aleck's
right arm so that--"

He drew a long breath, a difficult breath, and Ellen, listening, cried
out against the thing she instantly felt it meant.

"O Red! You don't mean--"

He nodded. "I took it off, an hour afterward--at the shoulder."

Ellen turned white, and in a moment more she was crying softly within
the shelter of her husband's arm. He sat with set lips, and eyes staring
at the empty fireplace before him. Presently he spoke again, and his
voice was very low, as if he could not trust it:

"Aleck was game. He was the gamest chap I ever saw. All he said when I
told him was, 'Go ahead, Doctor.' I never did a harder thing in all my
life. I suppose army surgeons get more or less used to it, but
somehow--when I knew what that arm meant to Aleck, and how an hour
before it had been a perfect thing, and now--"

He did not try to tell her more just then, but later, when both were
steadied, he added a few more important details to the story:

"Franz went to the hospital with them--wouldn't leave them--ran the risk
of losing his position. Do you know, Jord has been teaching that boy
English, evenings, and naturally Franz adores him. I suppose Jord would
have taken that skid for any blamed beggar who got in his way, but of
course it didn't take any force off the way he jammed on those brakes
when he saw it was a friend he was going to hit. And a friend he was
going to maim--pretty hard choice to make, wasn't it? But of course it
was sure death to Franz if he hit him, at that pace, so there was
nothing else to do but take the chance for himself and Aleck. Maybe you
can guess, though, how he feels about Aleck. One wouldn't think he knew
he'd been cruelly hurt himself."

"Oh! I thought--"

"Jord's back will give him a lot of trouble for a while, but his spine
isn't seriously injured, if I know my trade. Altogether--well--the
nurses have got a couple of interesting cases on their hands for a
while. No doubt Aleck will be well looked after. As for Jord--he'll be
so much the more helpless of the two for a while, I'm afraid he'll prove
a distraction that will demoralize the force."

He smiled faintly for the first time, but his face sobered again
instantly.

"Anne Linton's pretty weak, but she took a little nourishment sanely
this morning just before I came away. Miss Arden feels a trifle
encouraged. I confess this thing of Jord's has knocked the girl out of
my mind for the time being, though I shall get her back again fast
enough, if I don't find things going right when I see her. Well"--he
turned his wife's face toward him, with a hand against her cheek--"it's
all out now, and I'm eased a bit by the telling. I wish I could get
forty winks, just to make a break between last night and this morning."

"You shall. Lie down and I'll put you to sleep."

He did not think it possible, in spite of his exhaustion, but presently
under her quieting touch he was over the brink, greatly to Ellen's
relief. Her heart contracted with love and sympathy as she watched his
face. It was a weary face, now in its relaxation, and there were heavy
shadows under the closed eyes. Every now and then a frown crossed the
broad brow, as if the sleeper were not wholly at ease, could not forget,
even in his dreams, what he had had to do a few hours ago. She thought
of young Aleck with his manly, smiling face, his pride in keeping Jordan
King's car as fine and efficient beneath its hood--mud-splashed though
it often was without--as he did the shining limousine he drove for Mrs.
Alexander King, Jordan's mother. She thought of what it must be to him
now to know that he was maimed for life. As for King himself, she knew
him well enough to understand how his own injuries would count for
little beside his distress in having had to deal the blow which had
crushed that strong young arm of Aleck's. Her heart ached for them
both--and even for poor Franz, weeping at having been the innocent cause
of all this havoc.

Two hours' sleep did his wife secure for Burns before he woke, stoutly
avowing himself fit for anything again, and setting off, immediately
breakfast was over, for the place to which his thoughts had leaped with
his first return to consciousness.

"Can't rest till I see old Jord. Did I tell you that he insisted on
Aleck's having the room next his, precisely as big and airy as his own?
There's a door between, and when it's open they can see each other. When
I left Jord the door was open, and he was staring in at Aleck, who was
still sleeping off the anesthetic, and a big tear was running down
Jord's cheek. He can't stir himself, but that doesn't seem to bother him
any. He's going to suffer a lot of pain with his back, but he'll suffer
ten times more looking at that bandaged shoulder of Aleck's."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was four days later that Ellen saw King. She was prepared to find
him, as Burns had called him, "game," but she had not known just all
that term means among men when it is applied to such a one as he. If he
had been receiving her after having suffered a bad wrench of the ankle
he could not have treated the occasion more simply.

"This is mighty good of you," he said, reaching up a well-developed
right arm from his bed, where he lay flat on his back without so much as
a pillow beneath his head. His hair was carefully brushed, his bandages
were concealed, his lips were smiling, and altogether he was, except for
his prostrate position, no picture of an invalid.

"I've just been waiting to come," she said, returning the firm pressure
of his hand with that of both her own.

"And meanwhile you've kept me reminded of you by these wonderful
flowers," he said with a nod toward the ranks on ranks of roses which
crowded table and window sills.

"Oh, but not all those!" she denied. "I might have known you would be
deluged with them. Daisies and buttercups out of the fields would have
been better."

"No, because those you sent look like you. Doctor Burns won't grudge me
the pleasure of saying now what I like to his wife--and it's the first
time I've really dared tell you what I thought."

"What a charming compliment! But I'm going to send you something much
more substantial now--good things to eat, and books to read, if I can
just find out what you like--and even games to play, if you care for
them."

"I'll be delighted, if they're something Aleck and I can play together.
You see when that door is open we aren't far apart, and it won't be
long, Doctor Burns says, before he'll be walking in here to keep me
company--till he gets out."

"He is doing well, I hear. I'm so glad."

"Yes, that husky young constitution of his is telling finely--plus your
husband's surgery. My poor boy!" He shut his lips upon the words, and
kept them closely pressed together for an instant. "My word, Mrs.
Burns--he's the stuff that heroes are made of! His living to earn for
the rest of his life--with one arm--and you'd think he'd lost the tip of
one finger. If ever I let that boy go out of my employ--why, he's worth
more as a shining example of pluck than other men are worth with two
good arms!"

"I must go and see him--if he'd care to have me."

"He'd take it as the honour of his life. He's crazy over the flowers you
sent him."

"Would he care for books? And what sort? I'm going to bring both of you
books."

"Stories of adventure will suit Aleck--the wilder the better. Odd
choice--for such a peaceable-looking fellow, isn't it? As for
me--something I'll have to work hard to listen to, something to keep an
edge on my mind. I've counted the cracks in the ceiling till I have a
map of them by heart. I've worked out a system by which I can drain that
ceiling country and raise crops there. There isn't much else in this
room that I can count or lay out--worse luck! So I've named all the
roses, and have wagers with myself as to which will fade first. I'm
betting on Susquehanna, that big red one, to outlast all the rest."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Red Pepper looked in half an hour later, it was to find the door
open between the two rooms, and his wife listening, smiling, to an
incident of the night just past, as told by first one patient and then
the other. The two young men might have been two comrades lying beside a
campfire, so gay was their jesting with each other, so light their
treatment of the wakeful hours both had spent.

"No, there's nothing the matter with either of them," observed Burns,
looking from one bedside to the other. "Franz is the chap with the heavy
heart; these two are just enjoying a summer holiday. But I'm not going
to keep the communication open long at a time, as yet."

He went in to see Aleck, closing the door again. When he returned he
took up a position at the foot of King's bed, regarding him in silence.
Ellen looked up at her husband. There was something in his face which
had not been there of late--a curiously bright look, as if a cloud were
lifted. She studied him intently, and when he returned the scrutiny she
raised her eyebrows in an interrogation. He nodded, smiling quizzically.

"Jord," he said, "if you want to keep your secrets to yourself, beware
of letting any woman come within range. My wife has just read me as if I
were an open book in large black type."

"Bound in scarlet and gold," added Ellen. "Tell us, Red. You really have
good news?"

"The best. I am pretty confident Anne Linton has turned the corner. I
hoped it yesterday, but wasn't sure enough to say so. Did you know that,
too?"

"Of course. But you were in small type yesterday. To-day he who runs may
read. You would know it yourself, wouldn't you, Jordan?"

The man in the bed studied the man who stood at its foot. The two
regarded each other as under peculiar circumstances men do who have a
strong bond of affection and confidence between them.

"He's such a bluffer," said King. "I hadn't supposed anybody could tell
much about what he was thinking. But I do see he looks pretty jolly this
morning, and I don't imagine it's all bluff. I'm certainly glad to hear
Miss Linton is doing well."

"Doing well isn't exactly the phrase even now," admitted Red Pepper.
"There are lots of things that can happen yet. But the wind and waves
have floated her little craft off the rocks, and the leaks in the boat
are stopped. If she doesn't spring any more, and the winds continue
favourable, we'll make port."

Jordan King looked as happy as if he had been the brother of this
patient of Burns's, whom neither of them had known a month ago, and whom
one of them had seen but once.

"That's great," he said. "I haven't dared to ask since I came here
myself, knowing how poor the prospects were the last time I did ask. I
was afraid I should surely hear bad news. When can we begin to send her
flowers again? Couldn't I send some of mine? I'd like her to have
Susquehanna there, and Rappahannock--and I think Arapahoe and Apache
will run them pretty close on lasting. Would you mind taking them to her
when you go?" His eyes turned to Mrs. Burns.

"I'd love to, but I shall not dare to tell her you are here, just yet.
She is very weak, isn't she, Red?"

"As a starved pussy cat. The flowers won't hurt her, but we don't want
to rouse her sympathies as yet."

"I should say not. Don't mention me; just take her the posies,"
instructed King, his cheek showing a slight access of colour.

"You won't know whether Susquehanna wins your wager or not," Ellen
reminded him as she obediently separated the indicated blooms,
magnificent great hothouse specimens with stems like pillars. That the
finest of all these roses, not excepting those she had sent herself, had
come from private greenhouses, she well knew. The Kings lived in the
centre of the wealthiest quarter of the city, though not themselves
possessed of more than moderate riches. Their name, however, was an old
and honoured one, Jordan himself was a favourite, and none in the city
was too important to be glad to be admitted at his home.

"Anything more I can do for you before I go?" inquired Burns of his
patient when Ellen had gone, smiling back at King from over the big
roses and promising to keep track of Susquehanna for him in her daily
visits.

"Nothing, thank you. You did it all an hour ago, and left me more
comfortable than I expected to be just yet. I'm not sure whether it was
the dressing or the visit that did me the most good."

"You're a mighty satisfactory sort of patient. That good clean blood of
yours is telling already in your recovery from shock. It tells in
another way, too."

"What's that?"

"Sheer pluck."

King's eyelids fell. It meant much to him to stand well in the
estimation of this man, himself distinguished for the cool daring of his
work, his endurance of the hard drudgery of his profession as well as
the brilliant performance on occasion. "I'm glad you think so--Red
Pepper Burns," King answered daringly. Then, as the other laughed, he
added: "Do you know what would make me the most docile patient you could
ask?"

"Docile doesn't seem just the word for you--but I'd be glad to know, in
case of emergency."

"Let me call you that--the name your best friends have for you. It's a
bully name. I know I'm ten years younger--but--"

"Good lack! Jordan King, call me anything you like! I'll appreciate it."

"You've no idea how long I've wanted to do it--Red," vowed the younger
man, with the flush again creeping into his cheek.

"Why didn't you long ago?" Burns demanded. "Surely dignity's no
characteristic of mine. If Anne Linton can call me 'Red Head' on no
acquaintance at all--"

"She didn't do that!" King looked a little as if he had received a blow.

"Only when she was off her head, of course. She took me for a wildcat
once, poor child. No, no--when she was sane she addressed me very
properly. She's back on the old decorous ground now. Made me a beautiful
little speech this morning, informing me that I had to stop calling her
'little girl,' for she was twenty-four years old. As she looks about
fifteen at the present, and a starved little beggar at that, I found it
a bit difficult to begin on 'Miss Linton,' particularly as I have been
addressing her as 'Little Anne' all the time."

"Starved?" King seemed to have paused at this significant word.

"Oh, we'll soon fill her out again. She's really not half so thin as
she might be under the old-style treatment. It strikes me you have a
good deal of interest in my patients, Jord. Shall I describe the rest of
them for you?"

Burns looked mischievous, but King did not seem at all disturbed.

"Naturally I am interested in a girl you made me bring to the hospital
myself. And at present--well--a fellow feeling, you know. I see how it
is myself now. I didn't then."

"True enough. Well, I'll bring you daily bulletins from Miss Anne. And
when she's strong enough I'll break the news to her of your proximity.
Doubtless your respective nurses will spend their time carrying flowers
back and forth from one of you to the other."

"More than likely," King admitted. "Anything to fill in the time. I'm
sorry I can't take her out in my car when she's ready. I've been
thinking, Doctor--Red," he went on hastily, "that there's got to be some
way for Aleck to drive that car in the future. I'm going to work out a
scheme while I lie here."

"Work out anything. I'll prophesy right now that as soon as you get
fairly comfortable you'll think out more stuff while you're lying on
your back than you ever did in a given period of time before. It won't
be lost time at all; it'll be time gained. And when you do get back on
your legs--no, don't ask me when that'll be, I can't tell nor any other
fellow--but when you do get back you'll make things fly as they never
did before--and that's going some."

"You _are_ a great bluffer, but I admit that I like the sound of it,"
was King's parting speech as he watched Burns depart.

On account of this latest interview he was able to bear up the better
under the immediately following visit of his mother, an
aristocratic-looking, sweet-faced but sad-eyed lady, who could not yet
be reconciled to that which had happened to her son, and who visited him
twice daily to bring hampers of fruit, food, and flowers, in quantity
sufficient to sustain half the patients in a near-by ward. She
invariably shed a few quiet tears over him which she tried vainly to
conceal, addressed him in a mournful tone, and in spite of his efforts
to cheer her managed to leave behind her after each visit an atmosphere
of depression which it took him some time and strength to overcome.

"Poor mother, she can't help it," philosophized her son. "What stumps
me, though, is why one who takes life so hard should outlive a man like
my father, who was all that is brave and cheerful. Perhaps it took it
out of him to be always playing the game boldly against her fears. But
even so--give me the bluffers, like Red Pepper--and like Mrs. Red.
Jove! but she's a lovely woman. No wonder he adores her. So do I--with
his leave. And so does Anne Linton, I should imagine. Poor little
girl--what does she look like, I wonder?"

If he could have seen her at that moment, holding Susquehanna against
her hollow young cheek, the glowing flower making the white face a
pitiful contrast, he would have been even more touched than he could
have imagined. Also--he would have felt that his wager concerning
Susquehanna was likely to be lost. It is not conducive to the life of a
rose to be loved and caressed as this one was being. But since it was
the first of her flowers that Anne Linton had been able to take note of
and enjoy, it might have been considered a life--and a wager--well lost.




CHAPTER VI

HEAVY LOCAL MAILS


Anne Linton lifted her head ever so little from the allowed incline of
her pillow in the Good Samaritan Hospital. She peered anxiously at the
tray being borne toward her by Selina Arden, most scrupulously
conscientious of all trained nurses, and never more rigidly exact than
when the early diet of patients in convalescence was concerned.

"Is that all?" murmured Anne in a tone of anguish.

"All!" replied Miss Arden firmly. But she smiled, showing her perfect
white teeth--and showing also her sympathy by the tone in which she
added: "Poor child!"

"Shall I never, never, never," asked the patient, hungrily surveying the
tray at close range, "have enough just to dull these pangs a little? Not
enough to satisfy me, of course, but just enough to take the edge off?"

"Very soon now," replied Miss Arden cheerily, "you shall have a pretty
good-sized portion of beefsteak, juicy and tender, and you shall eat it
all up--"

"And leave not a wrack behind," moaned Anne Linton, closing her eyes.
"But you are wrong, Miss Arden--I shall not eat it, I shall _gulp_
it--the way a dog does. I always wondered why a dog has no manners about
eating. I know now. He is so hungry his eyes eat it first, so his mouth
has no chance. Well, I'm certainly thankful for the food on this tray.
It's awfully good--what there is of it."

She consumed it, making the process as lingering as was consistent with
the ravaging appetite which was a real torture. When the last mouthful
had vanished she set her eyes upon the clock--the little travelling
clock which was Miss Arden's and which had ticked busily and cheerfully
through all those days of illness when Anne's eyes had never once lifted
to notice the passage of time.

"I was so long about it," said the girl gleefully, "that now it's only
two hours and forty minutes to the next refreshment station. I expect I
can keep on living till then if I use all my will power."

"And here's something to make you forget how long two hours and forty
minutes are."

Miss Arden went to the door and, returning, laid suddenly in Anne's arms
a great, fragrant mass of white bloom, at the smell and touch of which
she gave a half-smothered cry of rapture, and buried her face in the
midst of it. "White lilacs--oh, white lilacs! The dears--the loves! Oh,
where _did_ they come from?"

"There's a note that came with them," admitted Miss Arden presently,
when she had let the question go unanswered for some time, while Anne,
seeming to forget that she had asked it, smelled and smelled of the cool
white and green branches as if she could never have enough of them. Into
her eyes had leaped a strange look, as if some memory were connected
with these outdoor flowers which made them different for her from the
hothouse blooms, or even from the daffodils and tulips that had
alternated with the roses which had come often since her convalescence
began.

Anne reached up an eager hand for the note, a look of surprise on her
face. Miss Arden, looking back at her, noted how each day was helping to
remove the pallor and wanness from that face. At the moment, under the
caress of the lilacs and the surprise of the impending note, it was
showing once more a decided touch of its former beauty. Also she was
wearing a little invalid's wrap of lace and pink silk, given her by Mrs.
Burns, and this helped the effect.

Anne unfolded the note. Miss Arden went away with the empty tray, and
remained away some time. Miss Arden, as has been said before, was a
most remarkable nurse.

The note read thus:

     The Next Corridor, 10:30 A.M.

     DEAR MISS LINTON:

     The time has come, it seems to me, for two patients who have
     nothing to do but while away the hours for a bit longer, to
     help each other out. What do you say? I suppose you don't know
     that I've been lying flat on my back now for a fortnight,
     getting over a rather bad spill from my car. I'm pretty
     comfortable now, thank you, so don't waste a particle of
     sympathy; but the hours must certainly drag for you as they do
     for me, and my idea is that we ought to establish some sort of
     system of intercommunication. I have an awfully obliging
     nurse, and a young man with a fiddle here besides, and I'd
     like to send you a short musicale when you feel up to it. Are
     you fond of music? I have a notion you are. Franz will come
     and play for you whenever you say. But besides that I'd
     awfully like to have a note from you as soon as you are able
     to write. I'll answer it, you know--and then you'll answer
     that, perhaps--and so the hours will go by. I know this is a
     rather free-and-easy-sounding proposition from a perfect
     stranger, as I suppose you think me, but circumstances do
     alter cases, you know, and if our circumstances can't alter
     our cases, then it's no good being laid up!

     Hearty congratulations on that raging appetite. You see Doctor
     Burns is good enough to keep me informed as to how you come
     on. You certainly seem to be coming on now. Please keep it up.
     I shouldn't dare ask you to write to me if the Doctor hadn't
     said you could--if you wouldn't do it enough to tire you.
     So--I'm hoping.

     Yours, under the same roof,

     JORDAN KING.

"Good morning!" said a beloved voice from the doorway. Anne looked up
eagerly from her letter.

"Oh, Mrs. Burns--good morning! And won't you please stand quite still
for a minute while I look at you?"

Ellen laughed. To other people than Anne Linton she was always the
embodiment of quiet charm in her freshness of attire and air of general
daintiness. In the pale gray and white of her summer clothing, with a
spray of purple lilac tucked into her belt, she was a vision to rest the
eye upon. "You are looking ever so well yourself to-day," Ellen said as
she sat down close beside Anne, facing her. "Another week and you will
be showing us what you really look like."

"The little pink cover-up does me as much good as anything," declared
Anne. "I never thought I could wear pink with my carroty hair. But Miss
Arden says I can wear anything you say I can, and I believe her."

"Your hair is bronze, not carroty, and that apricot shade of pink tones
in with it beautifully. What a glorious mass of white lilacs! I never
saw any so fine."

"They're wonderful. I insisted on keeping them right here, I'm so fond of
the fragrance. They came from Mr. King," said Anne frankly. "And a note
from him says he's here in the hospital with an injured back. I'm so
sorry. Please tell me how badly he is hurt."

"He will have to be patient for some weeks longer, I believe, but there
is no permanent injury. Meanwhile, he is like any man confined, restless
for want of occupation. Still, he keeps his time pretty full." And Ellen
proceeded to recount the story of Franz, and of how Jordan King was
continuing here in the hospital to teach him to speak English, finding
him the quickest and most grateful of pupils.

"How splendid of him! He's going to send Franz to play for me. I can't
think of anything--except beefsteak--I should like so much!" and Anne
laughed, her face all alight with interest. But the next instant it
sobered. "Mrs. Burns," she said, "there's something I want to say very
much, and so far the Doctor hasn't let me. But I'm quite strong enough
now to begin to make plans, and one of them is this: The minute I'm able
to leave the hospital I want to go to some inexpensive place where I can
stay without bothering anybody. You have all been so wonderful to me I
can never express my gratitude, but I'm beginning to feel--oh, can't you
guess how anxious I am to be taking care of myself again? And I want you
to know that I have quite money enough to do it until I can go on with
my work."

Mrs. Burns looked at her. In the excitement of talking the girl's face
looked rounder and of a better colour than it had yet shown, and her
eyes were glowing, eyes of such beauty as are not often seen. But for
all that, she seemed like some lovely child who could no more take care
of itself than could a newborn kitten. Ellen laid one hand on hers.

"You are not to think about such things yet, dear," she said. "Do you
imagine we have not grown very fond of you, and would let you go off
into some place alone before you are fully yourself again? Not a bit of
it. As soon as you can leave here you are coming to me as my guest. And
when you are playing tennis with Bob, on our lawn, you may begin to talk
about plans for the future."

Anne stared back at her, a strange expression on her face. "Oh, no!" she
breathed.

"Oh, yes! You can't think how I am looking forward to it. Meanwhile--you
are not to tire yourself with talking. I only stopped for a minute, and
the Doctor is waiting by now. Good-bye, my dear." And before Anne could
protest she was gone, having learned, by experience, that the way to
terminate useless argument with the one who is not strong enough to be
allowed to argue is by making early escape.

That afternoon, having recovered from the two surprises of the morning,
Anne asked for pencil and paper. Miss Arden, supplying them, stipulated
that their use should cover but five minutes.

"It is one of the last things we let patients do," she said, "though it
is the thing they all want to do first. There is nothing so tiring as
letter writing."

"I'm not going to write a letter," Anne replied, "just a hail to a
fellow sufferer. Only I'm no sufferer, and I'm afraid he is."

She wrote her note, and it was presently handed to Jordan King. He had
wondered very much what sort of answer he should have, feeling that
nothing could reveal the sort of person this girl was so surely as a
letter, no matter how short. He had been sure he recognized education in
her speech, breeding in her manner, high intelligence as well as beauty
in her face, but--well, the letter would reveal. And so it did, though
it was written in a rather shaky hand, in pencil, on one of Miss Arden's
hospital record blanks--of all things!

     DEAR MR. KING:

     It is the most wonderful thing in the world to be sitting up
     far enough to be able to write and tell you how sorry I am
     that you are lying down. But Mrs. Burns assures me that you
     are fast improving and that soon you will be about again.
     Meanwhile you are turning your time of waiting to a glorious
     account in teaching poor Franz to speak English. Surely he
     must have been longing to speak it, so that he might tell you
     the things in his heart--about that dreadful night. But I know
     you don't want me to write of that, and I won't.

     Of course I should care to have him play for me, and I hope
     he may do it soon--to-morrow, perhaps. I wonder if he knows
     the Schubert "_Frühlingstraum_"--how I should love to hear it!
     As for your interesting plan for relieving the passing hours,
     I should hardly be human if I did not respond to it! Only
     please never write when you don't feel quite like it--and
     neither will I.

     The white lilacs were even more beautiful than the roses and
     the daffodils. There was a long row of white lilac trees at
     one side of a garden I used to play in--I shall never, never
     forget what that fragrance was like after a rain! And now that
     my sun is shining again--after the rain--you may imagine what
     those white lilacs breathe of to me.

     With the best of good wishes,

     ANNE LINTON.


Jordan King read this note through three times before he folded it back
into its original creases. Then he shut it away in a leather-bound
writing tablet which lay by his side. "Franz," he said, addressing the
youth who was at this hour of the day his sole attendant, "can you play
Schubert's '_Frühlingstraum_'?"

He had to repeat this title several times, with varying accents, before
he succeeded in making it intelligible. But suddenly Franz leaped to an
understanding.

"Yess--yess--yess--yess--sair," he responded joyously, and made a dive
for his violin case.

"Softly, Franz," warned his master. As this was a word which had thus
far been often used in his education, on account of the fact that the
hospital did not belong exclusively to King--strange as that might seem
to Franz who worshipped him--it was immediately comprehended. Without
raising the tones of his instrument, Franz was able presently to make
clear to King that the music he was asked to play was of the best at his
command.

"No wonder she likes that," was King's inward comment. "It's a strange,
weird thing, yet beautiful in a haunting sort of way, I imagine, to a
girl like her, and I don't know but it would be to me if I heard it many
times--while I was smelling lilacs in the rain," he added, smiling to
himself.

That hint of a garden had rather taken hold of his imagination. More
than likely, he said to himself, it had been her own garden--only she
would not tell him so lest she seem to try to convey an idea of former
prosperity. A different sort of girl would have said "our garden."

       *       *       *       *       *

Next morning, at the time of Mrs. Burns's visit to the hospital, King
sent Franz to play for Miss Linton. With her breakfast tray had come his
second note telling her of this intention, so she had two hours of
anticipation--a great thing in the life of a convalescent. With every
bronze lock in shining order, with the little wrap of apricot pink silk
and lace about her shoulders, with an extra pillow at her back, Miss
Anne Linton awaited the coming of the "Court Musician," as King had
called him.

"It's a very good thing Jord can't see her at this minute," observed
Burns to his wife as he met her in the hall outside the door. "The
prettiest convalescent has less appeal for a doctor than a young woman
of less good looks in strapping health--naturally, for he gets quite
enough of illness and the signs thereof. But to a lusty chap like King
Miss Anne's present frail appearance would undoubtedly enlist his
chivalry. Those are some eyes of hers, eh?"

"I think I have never seen more beautiful eyes," Ellen agreed heartily.

Her husband laughed. "I have," he said, and went his way, having no time
for morning musicales.

That afternoon Anne Linton, having had all her pillows removed and
having obediently lain still and silent for two long hours, was
permitted to sit up again and write a note to King to tell him of the
joy of the morning:

     DEAR MR. KING:

     It was as if the twilight were falling, with the stars coming
     out one by one. By and by they were all shining, and I was on
     a mountain top somewhere, with the wind blowing softly
     against my face. It was dark and I was all alone, but I
     didn't mind, for I was strong, strong again, and I knew I
     could run down by and by and be with people. Then a storm came
     on, and I lifted my face to if and loved it, and when it died
     away the stars were shining again between the clouds.
     Somewhere a little bird was singing--I opened my eyes just
     there, and your Franz was looking at me and smiling, and I
     smiled back. He seemed so happy to be making me happy--for he
     was, of course. After a while it was dawn--the loveliest dawn,
     all flushed with pink and silver, and I couldn't keep my eyes
     shut any more for looking at the musician's face. He is a real
     musician, you know, and the music he makes comes out of his
     soul.

     When it was all over and he and Mrs. Burns were gone, my tray
     came in. This is a frightful confession, but I am not a real
     musician; I merely love good music with some sort of
     understanding of what it means to those who really care, as
     Franz does. To me, after all the emotion, my tray looked like
     a sort of solid rock that I could cling to. And I had a piece
     of wonderful beefsteak--ah, now you are laughing! Never
     mind--I'll show you the two scenes.

Upon the second sheet was something which made Jordan King open his
eyes. There were two little drawings--the simplest of pencil sketches,
yet executed with a spirit and skill which astonished him. The first was
of Franz himself, done in a dozen lines. There was no attempt at a
portrait, yet somehow Franz was there, in the very set of the head, the
angle of the lifted brow, the pose of the body, most of all in the
indication of the smiling mouth, the drooping eyelids. The second
picture was a funny sketch of a big-eyed girl devouring food from a
tray. Two lines made the pillows behind her, six outlined the tray, a
dozen more demonstrated plainly the famishing appetite with which the
girl was eating. It was all there--it was astonishing how it was all
there.

"My word!" he said as he laid down the sheets--and took them up again,
"that's artist work, whether she knows it or not. She must know it,
though, for she must have had training. I wonder where and how."

He called Miss Arden and showed her the sketches.

"Dear me, but they're clever," she said. "They look like a child's
work--and yet they aren't."

"I should say not," he declared very positively. "That sort of thing is
no child's work. That's what painters do when they're recording an
impression, and I've often looked in more wonder at such sketchy
outlines than at the finished product. To know how to get that
impression on paper so that it's unmistakable--I tell you that's
training and nothing else. I don't know enough about it to say it's
genius, too, yet I've had an artist friend tell me it cost him more to
learn to take the right sort of notes than to enlarge upon those notes
afterward."

When he wrote to Anne next morning--he was not venturing to ask more of
her than one exchange a day--he told her what he thought about those
sketches:

     I've had that sheet pinned up at the foot of my bed ever since
     it came, and I'm not yet tired of looking at it. You should
     have seen Franz's face when I showed it to him. "Ze arteeste!"
     he exclaimed, and laughed, and made eloquent gestures, by
     means of which I judged he was trying to express you. He
     looked as if he were trying to impress me with his own hair,
     his eyes, his cheeks, his hands; but I knew well enough he
     meant you. I gathered that he had been not ill pleased with
     his visit to you, for he proposes another; in fact, I think he
     would enjoy playing for you every day if you should care to
     hear him so often. He does not much like to perform in the
     wards, though he does it whenever I suggest it. He has
     discovered that though they listen respectfully while he plays
     his own beloved music, mostly they are happier when he gives
     them a bit of American ragtime, or a popular song hit. His
     distaste for that sort of thing is very funny. One would think
     he had desecrated his beloved violin when he condescends to
     it, for afterward he invariably gives it a special polishing
     with the old silk handkerchief he keeps in the case--and Miss
     Arden vows he washes his hands, too. Poor Franz! Your real
     artist has a hard time of it in this prosaic world doesn't he?

The note ended by saying boldly that King would like another sketch
sometime, and he even ventured to suggest that he would enjoy seeing a
picture of that row of white lilac trees at the edge of the garden where
Anne used to play. It was two days before he got this, and meanwhile a
box of water colours had come into requisition. When the sheet of heavy
paper came to King he lay looking at it with eyes which sparkled.

At first sight it was just a blur of blues and greens, with irregular
patches of white, and gay tiny dashes of strong colour, pinks and
purples and yellows. But when, as Anne had bidden him, he held it at
arm's length he saw it all--the garden with its box-bordered beds full
of tall yellow tulips and pink and white and purple hyacinths--it was
easy to see that this was what they were, even from the dots and dashes
of colour; the hedge--it was a real hedge of white lilac trees, against
a spring sky all scudding clouds of gray. Like the sketch of Franz, its
charm lay entirely in suggestion, not in detail, but was none the less
real for that.

There was one thing which, to King's observant eyes, stood out plainly
from the little wash drawing. This garden was a garden of the rich, not
of the poor. Just how he knew it so well he could hardly have told,
after all, for there was no hint of house, or wall, or even
summer-house, sundial, terrace, or other significant sign. Yet it was
there, and he doubted if Anne Linton knew it was there, or meant to have
it so. Perhaps it was that lilac hedge which seemed to show so plainly
the hand of a gardener in the planting and tending. The question
was--was it her own garden in which she had played, or the garden of her
father's employer? Had her father been that gardener, perchance? King
instantly rejected this possibility.




CHAPTER VII

WHITE LILACS


Burns, coming in to see King one day when the exchange of letters had
been going on for nearly a fortnight, announced that he might soon be
moved to his own home.

King stared at him. "I'm not absolutely certain that I want to go till I
can get about on my own feet," he said slowly.

Burns nodded. "I know, but that will be some time yet, and your
mother--well, I've put her off as long as I could, but without lying to
her I can't say it would hurt you now to be taken home. And lying's not
my long suit."

"Of course not. And I suppose I ought to go; it would be a comfort to my
mother. But--"

He set his lips and gave no further hint of his unwillingness to go
where he would be at the mercy of the maternal fondness which would
overwhelm him with the attentions he did not want. Besides--there was
another reason why, since he must for the present be confined somewhere,
he was loath to leave the friendly walls where there was now so much of
interest happening every day. Could he keep it happening at home? Not
without much difficulty, as he well foresaw.

"Miss Linton's coming to us on Saturday," observed Burns carelessly,
strolling to the window with his hands in his pockets.

"Is she? I didn't suppose she'd be strong enough just yet." King tried
to speak with equal carelessness, but the truth was that, with his life
bound, as it was at present, within the confines of this room, the
incidents of each day loomed large.

"She's gaining remarkably fast. For all her apparent delicacy of
constitution when she came to us, I'm beginning to suspect that she's
the fortunate possessor of a good deal of vigour at the normal. She says
herself she was never ill before, and that's why she didn't give up
sooner--couldn't believe there was anything the matter. We can't make
her agree to stay with us a day longer than I say is a necessity for
safety."

"Where does she want to go? Not back to that infernal book-agenting?"
There was a frown between King's well-marked brows.

"Yes, I imagine that's what she intends. She's a very decided young
person, and there's not much use telling her what she must and must not
do. As for the book itself, it's pretty clever, my wife and Miss
Mathewson insist. They say the youngsters of the neighbourhood are
crazy over it. Bob knows it by heart, and even the Little-Un studies the
pictures half an hour at a time. If children were her buyers she'd have
no trouble."

"Have a look at those, will you?"

King reached for a leather writing case on the table at his elbow, took
out a pile of sheets, and began to hand them over one by one to Burns.

"What's this? Hullo! Do you mean to say she did this? Well, I like her
impudence!"

"So do I," laughed King, looking past Burns's shoulder at a saucy sketch
of the big Doctor himself evidently laying down the law about something,
by every vigorous line of protest in his attitude and the thrust of his
chin. Underneath was written: "Absolutely not! Haven't I said so a
thousand times?"

"'Wad some power--'" murmured Burns. "Well, she seems to have the
'power.' I am rather a thunderer, I suppose. What's this next? My wife!
Jolly! that's splendid. Hasn't she caught a graceful pose though?
Ellen's to the life. Selina Arden? That's good--that's very good.
There's your conscientious nurse for you. And this, of herself? Ha! She
hasn't flattered herself any. She may have looked like that at one time,
but not now--hardly."

"She's looking pretty well again, is she?"

"Both pretty and well. We don't starve our patients on an exclusively
liquid diet the way we used to, and they don't come out of typhoid
looking half so badly in consequence. And she's been rounding out every
day for the last two weeks in fine shape. She's a great little girl, and
as full of spirit as a gray squirrel. I'm beginning to believe she's a
bit older than I would believe at first; that mind of hers is no
schoolgirl's; it's pretty mature. She says frankly she's twenty-four,
though she doesn't look over nineteen."

"Is there any reason why I can't see her for a bit of a visit if she
goes Saturday?" asked King straightforwardly. It was always a
characteristic of his to go straight to a point in any matter; intrigue
and diplomacy were not for him in affairs which concerned a girl any
more than in those which pertained to his profession. "You see we've
been entertaining each other with letters and things, and it would seem
a pity not to meet--especially if she'll be leaving town before I'm
about."

There was a curiously wistful look in his face as he said this, which
Burns understood. All along King had said almost nothing about the
torture his present helplessness was to him, but his friend knew.

"Of course she'll come; we'll see to that. She's walking about a little
now, and by Saturday she can come down this corridor on her two small
feet."

"See here--couldn't I sit up a bit to meet her?"

"Not a sixteenth of a degree. You'll lie exactly as flat as you are now.
If it's any consolation I'll tell you that you look like a prostrate
man-angel seven feet long."

"Thanks. I'd fire a pillow at you if I had one. I don't want to look
like an object for sympathy, that's all."

Burns nodded understandingly. "Well, Jord," he said a moment later,
"will you go home on Saturday, too?"

The two looked at each other. Then, "If you say so," King agreed.

"All right. Then we'll get rid of two of our most interesting patients
on that happy day. Never mind--the mails will still carry--and Franz is
a faithful messenger. What's that, Miss Dwight? All right, I'll be
there." And he went out, with a gay nod and wave of the hand to the man
on the bed.

This was on Monday. On Tuesday King offered his petition that Anne
Linton would pay him a visit before she left on Saturday. When the
answer came it warmed his heart more than anything he had yet had from
her:

     Of course I will come--only I want you to know that I shall be
     dreadfully sorry to come walking, when you must still lie so
     long on that poor back. Doctor Burns has told me how brave you
     are, with all the pain you are still suffering. But I am
     wonderfully glad to learn that he is so confident of your
     complete recovery. Just to know that you can be your active
     self again is wonderful when one thinks what might have
     happened. I shall always remember you as you seemed to me the
     day you brought me here. I was, of course, feeling pretty
     limp, and the sight of you, in such splendid vigour, made me
     intensely envious. And even though I see you now "unhorsed," I
     shall not lose my first impression, because I know that by and
     by you will be just like that again--looking and feeling as if
     you were fit to conquer the world.

It was the most personal note he had had from her, and he liked it very
much. He couldn't help hoping for more next day, and did his best to
secure it by the words he wrote in reply. But Wednesday's missive was
merely a merrily piquant description of the way she was trying her
returning strength by one expedition after another about her room. On
Thursday she sent him some very jolly sketches of her "packing up," and
on Friday she wrote hurriedly to say that she couldn't write, because
she was making little visits to other patients.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jordan King had never been more exacting as to his dressing than on that
Saturday. He studied his face in the glass after an orderly had shaved
him, to make sure that the blue bloom it took but a few hours to
acquire had been properly subdued. He insisted on a particular silk
shirt to wear under the loose black-silk lounging robe which enveloped
him, and in which he was to be allowed to-day to lie upon the bed
instead of in it. His hair had to be brushed and parted three separate
times before he was satisfied.

"I didn't know I was such a fop," he said, laughing, as Miss Dwight
rallied him on his preparations for receiving the ladies. "But somehow
it seems to make a difference when a man lies on his back. They have him
at a disadvantage. Now if you'll just give me a perfectly good
handkerchief I'll consider that the reception committee is ready. Thank
you. It must be almost time for them, isn't it?"

For a young man who usually spent comparatively little of his time in
attentions to members of the other sex, but who was accustomed,
nevertheless, to be entirely at his ease with them, King acknowledged to
himself that he felt a curious excitement mounting in his veins as the
light footsteps of his guests approached.

Mrs. Burns came first into his line of vision, wearing white from head
to foot, for it was early June and the weather had grown suddenly to be
like that of midsummer. Behind her followed not the black figure King's
memory had persistently pictured, but one also clad in white--the very
simple white of a plain linen suit, with a close little white hat drawn
over the bronze-red hair. Under this hat the eyes King remembered glowed
warmly, and now there was health in the face, which was so much more
charming than the one he recalled that for a moment he could hardly
believe the two the same. Yet--the profile, as she looked at Mrs. Burns,
who spoke first, was the one which had been stamped on his mind as one
not to be forgotten.

She was looking at him now, and there was no pity in her bright
glance--he could not have borne to see it if it had been there. She came
straight up to the bed, her hand outstretched--her gloves were in the
other, as if she were on her way downstairs, as he presently found she
was. She spoke in a full, rich voice, very different from the weary one
he had heard before.

"Do you know me?" she asked, smiling.

"Almost I don't. Have you really been ill, or did you make it all up?"

"I'm beginning to believe I did. I feel myself as if it must be all
dream. How glad I am to find you able to be dressed. Doctor Burns says
you will go home to-day, too."

"This evening, I believe. I thought you were not going till then
either."

"This very hour." She glanced at Mrs. Burns. "My good fairy begged that
I might go early, because it is her little son's birthday. I am to be
at a real party; think of that!"

"The Little-Un's or Bob's?" King asked his other visitor.

Bob was an adopted child, taken by Burns before his marriage, but the
little Chester's parents made no difference between them, and a birthday
celebration for the older boy was sure to be quite as much of an
occasion as for the two-year-old.

"Bob's," Mrs. Burns explained. "He is ten; we can't believe it. And he
has set his heart on having Miss Linton at home for his party. He has
read her little book almost out of its covers, and she has been doing
some place-cards for his guests--the prettiest things!" Ellen opened a
small package she was carrying and showed King the cards.

He gazed at them approvingly. "They're the jolliest I ever saw; the
youngsters will be crazy over them. For a convalescent it strikes me
Miss Linton has been the busiest known to the hospital."

"You, yourself, have kept me rather busy, Mr. King," the girl observed.

"So I have. I'm wondering what I'm to do when you are at Doctor Burns's
and I at home."

She smiled. "I shall be there only a week if I keep on gaining as fast
as I am now."

"A fortnight," interpolated Mrs. Burns, "is the earliest possible date
of your leaving us. And not then unless we think you fit."

"Did you ever know of such kindness?" Anne Linton asked softly of King.
"To a perfect stranger?"

He nodded. "Nothing you could tell me of their kindness could surprise
me. About that fortnight--would it be asking a great deal of you to keep
on sending me that daily note?"

"Isn't there a telephone in your own room at home?" she asked.

"Yes--how did you know?"

"I guessed it. Wouldn't a little telephone talk do quite as well--or
better--than a letter?"

"It would be very nice," admitted King. "But I should hate to do without
the letter. The days are each a month long at present, you know, and
each hour is equal to twenty-four. Make it a letter, too, will you,
please?"

Miss Linton looked at Mrs. Burns. "Do you think circumstances still
alter cases?" she inquired.

Her profile, as King caught it again, struck him as a perfect outline.
To think of this girl starting out again, travelling alone, selling
books from door to door!

"I think you will be quite warranted in being very good to Mr.
King--while his hours drag as he describes," Ellen assented cordially.

"As soon as I can sit up at any sort of decent angle I can do a lot of
work on paper," King asserted. "Then I'll make the time fly.
Meanwhile--it's all right."

They talked together for a little, then King sent for Franz, who came
and played superbly, his eager eyes oftenest on Jordan King, like those
of an adoring and highly intelligent dog. Anne watched Franz, and King
watched Anne. Mrs. Burns, seeming to watch nobody, noted with
affectionate and somewhat concerned interest the apparent trend of the
whole situation. She could not help thinking, rather dubiously, of Mrs.
Alexander King, Jordan's mother.

And, as things happen, it was just as Franz laid down his bow, after a
brilliant rendering of a great concerto, that Mrs. Alexander King came
in. She entered noiselessly, a slender, tall, black-veiled figure, as
scrupulously attired in her conventional deep mourning as if it were not
hot June weather, when some lightening of her sombre garb would have
seemed not only rational but kind to those who must observe her.

"Oh, mother!" King exclaimed. "In all this heat? I didn't expect you.
I'm afraid you ought not to have come."

She bent over him. "The heat has nothing to do with my feelings toward
my son. I couldn't neglect you, dear."

She greeted Ellen cordially, who presented Miss Linton. King lost
nothing of his mother's polite scrutiny of the girl, who bore it without
the slightest sign of recognizing it beyond the lowering of her lashes
after the first long look of the tall lady had continued a trifle beyond
the usual limit. Book agent though she might be, Miss Linton's manner
was faultless, a fact King noted with curious pride in his new
friend--whom, though he himself was meeting her for but the second time,
he somehow wanted to stand any social test which might be put upon her.
And he well knew that his lady mother could apply such tests if anybody
could.

In his heart he was saying that it seemed hard luck, he must say
good-bye to Anne Linton in that mother's presence. There was small
chance to make it a leave-taking of even ordinary good fellowship
beneath that dignified, quietly appraising eye, to say nothing of
endowing it with a quality which should in some measure compensate for
the fact that it might be a parting for a long time to come. However
much or little the exchange of notes during these last weeks might have
come to mean to Jordan King, aside from the diversion they had offered
to one sorely oppressed of mind and body, he resented being now forced
to those restrained phrases of farewell which he well knew were the only
ones that would commend him to his mother's approval.

Mrs. Burns and Miss Linton rose to go, summoned by Red Pepper himself,
who was to take them. In the momentary surge of greeting and small talk
which ensued, King surreptitiously beckoned Anne near. He looked up with
the direct gaze of the man who intends to make the most of the little
that Fate sends him.

"Letters are interesting things, aren't they?" he asked.

"Very. And when they are written by a man lying on his back, who doesn't
know when he is down, they are stimulating things," she answered; and
there was that in the low tone of her voice and the look of her eyes
which was as if she had pinned a medal for gallantry on the breast of
the black silk robe.

Mrs. Alexander King looked at her son--and moved nearer. She addressed
Anne. "I am more than glad to see, Miss Linton," said she, "that you are
fully recovered. Please let me wish you much success in your work. I
suppose we shall not see you again after you leave Mrs. Burns."

"No, Mrs. King," responded Anne's voice composedly. "Thank you for that
very kind wish."

She turned to the prostrate one once more. She put her hand in his, and
he held it fast for an instant, and, in spite of his mother's gaze, it
was an appreciable instant longer than formality called for.

"I shall hope to see you again," he said distinctly, and the usual
phrase acquired a meaning it does not always possess.

Then they were gone, and he had only the remembrance of Anne's parting
look, veiled and maidenly, but the comprehending look of a real friend
none the less.

"My dear boy, you must be quite worn out with all this company in this
exhausting weather," murmured Mrs. King, laying a cool hand on a
decidedly hot brow.

The brow moved beneath her hand, on account of a contraction of the
smooth forehead, as if with pain. "I really hadn't noticed the weather,
mother," replied her son's voice with some constraint in it.

"You must rest now, dear. People who are perfectly well themselves are
often most inconsiderate of an invalid, quite without intention, of
course."

"If I never receive any less consideration than I have had here, I shall
do very well for the rest of my life."

"I know; they have all been very kind. But I shall be so relieved when
I can have you at home, where you will not feel obliged to have other
patients on your mind. In your condition it is too much to expect."

Jordan King was a good son, and he loved his mother deeply. But there
were moments when, as now, if he could have laid a kind but firm hand
upon her handsome, emotional mouth, he would have been delighted to do
so.




CHAPTER VIII

EXPERT DIAGNOSIS


"What would you give for a drive with me this morning?" Burns surveyed
his patient, now dressed and downstairs upon a pillared rear porch,
wistfulness in his eyes but determination on his lips.

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes. We may as well try what that back will stand. Most of the drive
will be sitting still in front of houses, anyhow, and in your plaster
jacket you're pretty safe from injury."

"Thank heaven!" murmured Jordan King fervently.

Two minutes later he was beside Burns in the Doctor's car, staring
eagerly ahead, lifting his hat now and then as some one gave him
interested greeting from passing motor. More than once Burns was obliged
to bring his car to a short standstill, so that some delighted friend
might grasp King's hand and tell him how good it seemed to see him out.
With one and all the young man was very blithe, though he let them do
most of the talking. They all told him heartily that he was looking
wonderfully well, while they ignored with the understanding of the
intelligent certain signs which spoke of physical and mental strain.

"Your friends," Burns remarked as they went on after one particularly
pleasant encounter, "seem to belong to the class who possess brains. I
wish it were a larger class. Every day I find some patient suffering
from depression caused by fool comments from some well-meaning
acquaintance."

"I've had a few of those, too," King acknowledged.

"I'll wager you have. Well, among a certain class of people there seems
to be an idea that you can't show real sympathy without telling the
victim that he's looking very ill, and that you have known several such
cases which didn't recover. I have one little woman on my list who would
have been well long ago if she hadn't had so many loving friends to
impress her with the idea that her case was desperate. I talk Dutch to
such people now and then, when I get the chance, but it doesn't do much
good. Sometimes I get so thundering mad I can't stand it, and then I rip
out something that makes me a lasting enemy."

"You get some comfort out of the explosion, anyhow," King commented,
with a glance at the strong profile beside him. "Besides, you may do
more good than you know. Anybody who had had a good dressing down from
you once wouldn't be likely to forget it in a hurry."

Burns laughed at this, as they stopped in front of a house. King had a
half-hour wait while his friend was inside. The car stood in heavy
shade, and he was very comfortable. He took a letter from his pocket as
he sat, a letter which looked as if it had been many times unfolded, and
read it once more, his face very sober as his eyes followed the familiar
lines:

     DEAR MR. KING:

     I was very, very sorry to go away without seeing you to say
     good-bye after our interesting correspondence. Mrs. Burns and
     I had such a pleasant visit with your mother, in your absence,
     that we felt rewarded for our call, and it was good to know
     that you could be out, yet of course we were very
     disappointed. I do hope that all will go well with you, and
     that very rapidly, for I can guess how eager you are to be at
     work.

     Of course once I am off on my travels I shall have no time for
     letters. No, that isn't quite frank, is it? Well, I will be
     truthful and say honestly that I am sure it is not best that I
     should keep on writing. I am glad if the letters have, as you
     say, helped you through the worst of the siege; they surely
     have helped me. But now--our ways part. Sometime I may give
     you a hail from somewhere--when I am lonely and longing to
     know how you get on. And sometime I may be back at my old
     home. But wherever I am I shall never forget you, Jordan King,
     for you have put something into my life which was not there
     before and I am the better for it. As for you--your life will
     not be one whit the less big and efficient for this trying
     experience; it will be bigger, I think, and finer. I am glad,
     glad I have known you.

     ANNE LINTON.

For the hundredth time King felt his heart sink as he thought of that
prevented last interview. His mother had prevented it. It was perfectly
true that he was out, and away from home--out in a wheeled chair, which
had been pushed by Franz through a gap in the hedge between the Kings'
lawn and the Wentworths' next door. Just on the other side of that hedge
the chair had paused, where Sally Wentworth, his friend of long
standing, was serving tea to a little group of young people, all
intimates and all delighted to have the invalid once more in their
midst. Under the group of great copper beeches which made of that corner
of the Wentworth lawn a summer drawing room, King had sat in his chair
drinking tea and listening to gay chatter--and wondering why he had not
been able to get Anne Linton on the telephone so far that day. And at
that very time, so he now bitterly reflected, she and Mrs. Burns had
made their call upon him, only to be told by Mrs. King that he was
"out."

His mother was unquestionably a lady, and she had told the truth; he
could not conceive of her doing otherwise. He knew that she undoubtedly,
quite as Anne had said, had made the call a pleasant one. But she had
known that he was within a stone's throw of the house, and that he would
be bitterly disappointed not to be summoned. She had not mentioned to
him the fact of the call at all until next day--when Anne Linton had
been gone a full two hours upon her train. Then, when he had called up
Mrs. Burns, in a fever of haste to learn what had happened and what
there might yet be a chance of happening, he had discovered that Ellen
herself had tried three times to get him, upon the telephone, and had at
last realized--though this she did not say--that it was not intended
that she should.

King understood his mother perfectly. She would scorn directly to
deceive him, yet to intrigue quietly but effectively against him in such
a case as this she would consider only her duty. She had seen clearly
his interest in the stranger, unintroduced and unvouched for, taken in
by kind people in an emergency, and though showing unquestionable marks
of breeding, none the less a stranger. She had feared for him, in his
present vulnerable condition; and she had done her part in preventing
that final parting which might have contained elements of danger. That
was all there was to it.

For the present King was helpless, and there could be no possible use in
reproaching his mother for her action--or lack of action. Once let him
get up on his feet, his own master once more--then it would be of use to
talk. And talk he would some day. Also he would act. Meanwhile--

Red Pepper Burns came out of the house and scrutinized his friend and
patient closely as he approached. "Want to go on, or shall I take you
home?" he inquired.

"Take me on--anywhere--everywhere! Something inside will break loose if
you don't." King spoke with a smothered note of irritation new to him in
Burns's experience.

"You've about reached the limit, have you?" The question was
straightforward, matter-of-fact in tone, but King knew the sympathy
behind it.

"I rather have," the young man admitted. "I'm ashamed to own it."

"You needn't be. It's a wonder you haven't reached it sooner; I should
have. Well, if you stand this drive pretty well to-day you ought to come
on fast. With that back, you may be thankful you're getting off as
easily as you are."

"I am thankful--everlastingly thankful. It's just--"

"I know. Blow off some of that steam; it won't hurt you. Here we are on
the straight road. I'll open up and give you a taste of what poor Henley
felt the first time his crippled body and his big, uncrippled spirit
tasted the delight of 'Speed.' Remember?"

"Indeed I do. Oh, I'm not complaining. You understand that, Red?"

"Of course I understand--absolutely. And I understand that you need just
what I say--to blow off a lot of steam. Hurt you or not, I'm going to
let loose for a couple of miles and blow it off for you."

In silence, broken only by the low song of the motor as it voiced its
joy in the widening license to show its power, the two men took the wind
in their faces as the car shot down the road, at the moment a clear
highway for them. King had snatched off his hat, and his dark hair blew
wildly about his forehead, while his eyes watched the way as intently as
if he had been driving himself, though his body hardly tensed, so
complete was his confidence in the steady hands on the wheel. Faster and
faster flew the car, until the speed indicator touched a mark seldom
passed by King himself at his most reckless moments. His lips, set at
first, broke into a smile as the pointing needle circled the dial, and
his eyes, if any could have seen them, would have told the relief there
was for him in escape by flight, though only temporary, from the
grinding pull of monotony and disablement.

At the turn ahead appeared obstruction, and Burns was obliged to begin
slowing down. When the car was again at its ordinary by no means slow
pace, King spoke:

"Bless you for a mind reader! That was bully, and blew away a lot of
distemper. If you'll just do it again going back I'll submit to the
afternoon of a clam in a bed of mud."

"Good. We'll beat that record going back, if we break the speedometer.
Racing with time isn't supposed to be the game for a convalescent, but
I'm inclined to think it's the dose you need, just the same. I expect,
Jord, that the first time you pull on a pair of rubber boots and go to
climbing around a big concrete dam somewhere your heart will break for
joy."

"My heart will stand anything, so that it's action."

"Will it? I thought it might be a bit damaged. It's had a good deal of
reaction to stand lately, I'm afraid."

There was silence for a minute, then King spoke:

"Red, you're a wizard."

"Not much of a one. It doesn't take extraordinary powers of penetration
to guess that a flame applied to a bundle of kindling will cause a fire.
And when you keep piling on the fuel something's likely to get burned."

"Did I pile on the fuel?"

"You sure did. If there had been gunpowder under the kindling you could
have expected an explosion--and a wreck."

"There's no wreck."

"No? I thought there might be--somewhere."

King spoke quickly. "Do you think I carried it too far?"

"I think you carried it some distance--for an invalid's diversion."

The young man flushed hotly. "I was genuinely interested and I saw no
harm. If there's any harm done it's to myself, and I can stand that. I'm
not conceited enough to imagine that a broken-backed cripple could make
any lasting impression."

Burns turned and surveyed his companion with some amusement. "Do you
consider that a description of yourself?"

"I certainly do." Jordan King's strong young jaw took on a grim
expression.

"Know this then"--Burns spoke deliberately--"there's not a sane girl who
liked you well enough before your accident to marry you who wouldn't
marry you now."

"That's absurd. Women want men, not cripples."

"You're no cripple. Stop using that term."

"What else? A man condemned to wear a plaster jacket for at least a
year." King evidently did his best not to speak bitterly.

"Bosh! Suppose the same thing happened to me. Would you look on me
askance for the rest of my days, no matter what man's job I kept on
tackling? Besides, the plaster jacket's only a precaution. You wouldn't
disintegrate without it."

King looked at Red Pepper Burns and smiled in spite of himself. "I'm
glad to hear that, I'm sure. As for looking at you askance--you are you,
R.P. Burns."

"Apply the same logic to yourself. You are you, and will continue to be
you, plus some assets you haven't had occasion to acquire before in the
way of dogged endurance, control of mind, and such-like qualities, bred
of need for them. You will be more to us all than you ever were, and
that's saying something. And the back's going to be a perfectly good
back; give it time. As for--if you don't mind my saying it--that
invalid's diversion, I don't suppose it's hurt you any. What I'm
concerned for is the hurt it may have done somebody else. I don't need
to tell you that it wasn't possible for Ellen and me to have that little
girl on our hearts all that time and not get mightily interested in her.
She's the real thing, too, we're convinced, and we care a good deal what
happens to her next."

Jordan King drew a deep breath. "So do I."

Burns gave him a quick look. "That's good. But you let her go away
without making sure of keeping any hold on her. You don't know where she
is now."

King shot him a return look. "That wasn't my fault. That was hard luck."

"I don't think much of luck. Get around it."

"I'll do my best, I promise you. But I wish you'd tell me--"

"Yes?"

"--why you should think I had done her any harm. Heaven knows I wouldn't
do that for my right arm!"

"She didn't make a sign--not one--of any injury, I assure you. She's a
gallant little person, if ever there was one--and a thoroughbred, though
she may be as poor as a church mouse. No, I should never have guessed
it. She went away with all sails set and the flags flying. All I know is
what my wife says."

"Please tell me."

"I'm not sure it will be good for you." Burns smiled as he drew up
beside a house. "However--if you will have it--she says Miss Anne Linton
took away with her every one of your numerous letters, notes, and even
calling cards which had been sent with flowers. She also took a halftone
snapshot of you out at the Coldtown dam, cut from a newspaper,
published the Sunday after your accident. The sun was in your eyes and
you were scowling like a fiend; it was the worst picture of you
conceivable."

"Girls do those things, I suppose," murmured King with a rising colour.

"Granted. And now and then one does it for a purpose which we won't
consider. But a girl of the type we feel sure Miss Linton to be
carefully destroys all such things from men she doesn't care
for--particularly if she has started on a trip and is travelling light.
Of course she may have fooled us all and be the cleverest little
adventuress ever heard of. But I'd stake a good deal on Ellen's
judgment. Women don't fool women much, you know, whatever they do with
men."

He disappeared into a small brown house, and King was left once more
with his own thoughts. When Burns came out they drove on again with
little attempt at conversation, for Burns's calls were not far apart.
King presently began to find himself growing weary, and sat very quietly
in his seat during the Doctor's absences, experiencing, as he had done
many times of late, a sense of intense contempt for himself because of
his own physical weakness. In all his sturdy life he had never known
what it was to feel not up to doing whatever there might be to be done.
Fatigue he had known, the healthy and not unpleasant fatigue which
follows vigorous and prolonged labour, but never weakness or pain,
either of body or of mind. Now he was suffering both.

"Had about enough?" Burns inquired as he returned to the car for the
eighth time. "Shall I take you home?"

"I'm all right."

Burns gave him a sharp glance. "To be sure you are. But we'll go home
nevertheless. The rest of my work is at the hospital anyhow."

As they were approaching the long stretch of straight road to which King
had looked forward an hour ago, but which he was disgusted to find
himself actually rather dreading now, a great closed car of luxurious
type, and bearing upon its top considerable travelling luggage, slowed
down as it neared, and a liveried chauffeur held up a detaining hand.
Burns stopped to answer a series of questions as to the best route
toward a neighbouring city. There were matters of road mending and
detours to be made plain to the inquirers, so the detention occupied a
full five minutes, during which the chauffeur got down and came to
Burns's side with a road map, with which the two wrestled after the
fashion usually made necessary by such aids to travel.

During this period Jordan King underwent a disturbing experience.
Looking up with his usual keen glance, one trained to observe whatever
might be before it, he took in at a sweep the nature of the party in the
big car. That it was a rich man's car, and that its occupants were those
who naturally belonged in it, there was no question. From the owner
himself, an aristocrat who looked the part, as not all aristocrats do,
to those who were presumably his wife, his son, and daughters, all were
of the same type. Simply dressed as if for a long journey, they yet
diffused that aroma of luxury which cannot be concealed.

The presumable son, a tall, hawk-nosed young man who sat beside the
chauffeur, turned to speak to those inside, and King's glance followed
his. He thus caught sight of a profile next the open window and close by
him. He stared at it, his heart suddenly standing still. Who was this
girl with the bronze-red hair, the perfect outline of nose and mouth and
chin, the sea-shell colouring? Even as he stared she turned her head,
and her eyes looked straight into his.

He had seen Miss Anne Linton only twice, and on the two occasions she
had seemed to him like two entirely different girls. But this girl--was
she not that one who had come to visit him in his room at the hospital,
full of returning health and therefore of waxing beauty and vigour?

For one instant he was sure it was she, no matter how strange it was
that she should be here, in this rich man's car--unless--But he had no
time to think it out before he was overwhelmed by the indubitable
evidence that, whoever this girl was, she did not know him. Her
eyes--apparently the same wonderful eyes which he could now never
forget--looked into his without a sign of recognition, and her
colour--the colour of radiantly blooming youth--did not change
perceptibly under his gaze. And after that one glance, in which she
seemed to survey him closely, after the manner of girls, as if he were
an interesting specimen, her eyes travelled to Red Pepper Burns and
rested lightly on him, as if he, too, were a person of but passing
significance to the motor traveller looking for diversion after many
dusty miles of more or less monotonous sights.

King continued to gaze at her with a steadiness somewhat indefensible
except as one considers that all motorists, meeting on the highway, are
accustomed to take note of one another as comrades of the road. He was
not conscious that the other young people in the car also regarded him
with eyes of interest, and if he had he would not have realized just
why. His handsome, alert face, its outlines slightly sharpened by his
late experiences, his well-dressed, stalwart figure, carried no hint of
the odious plaster jacket which to his own thinking put him outside the
pale of interest for any one.

But it could not be Anne Linton; of course it could not! What should a
poor little book agent be doing here in a rich man's car--unless she
were in his employ? And somehow the fact that this girl was not in any
man's employ was established by the manner in which the young man on the
front seat spoke to her, as he now did, plainly heard by King. Though
all he said was some laughing, more or less witty thing about this being
the nineteenth time, by actual count since breakfast, that a question of
roads and routes had arisen, he spoke as to an equal in social status,
and also--this was plainer yet--as to one on whom he had a more than
ordinary claim. And King listened for her answer--surely he would know
her voice if she spoke? One may distrust the evidence of one's eyes when
it comes to a matter of identity, but one's ears are not to be deceived.

But King's ears, stretched though they might be, metaphorically
speaking, like those of a mule, to catch the sound of that voice, caught
nothing. She replied to the young man on the front seat only by a nod
and a smile. Then, as the chauffeur began to fold up his road map,
thanking Burns for his careful directions, and both cars were on the
point of starting, the object of King's heart-arresting scrutiny looked
at him once again. Her straight gaze, out of such eyes as he had never
seen but on those two occasions, met his without flinching--a long,
steady, level look, which lasted until, under Burns's impatient hand,
the smaller car got under motion and began to move. Even then, though
she had to turn her head a little, she let him hold her gaze--as, of
course, he was nothing loath to do, being intensely and increasingly
stirred by the encounter with its baffling hint of mystery. Indeed, she
let him hold that gaze until it was not possible for her longer to
maintain her share of the exchange without twisting about in the car. As
for King, he did not scruple to twist, as far as his back would let him,
until he had lost those eyes from his view.




CHAPTER IX

JORDAN IS A MAN


When King turned back again to face the front his heart was thumping
prodigiously. Almost he was certain it had been Anne Linton; yet the
explanation--if there were one--was not to be imagined. And if it had
been Anne Linton, why should she have refused to know him? There could
have been little difficulty for her in identifying him, even though she
had seen him last lying flat on his back on a hospital bed. And if there
had been a chance of her not knowing him--there was Red Pepper.

It was Anne. It could not be Anne. Between these two convictions King's
head was whirling. Whoever it was, she had dared to look straight into
his eyes in broad daylight at a distance of not more than four feet. He
had seen into the very depths of her own bewildering beauty, and the
encounter, always supposing her to be the person of whom he had thought
continuously for four months, was a thing to keep him thinking about her
whether he would or no.

"Anything wrong?" asked Burns's voice in its coolest tones. "I suspect
I was something of an idiot to give you such a big dose of this at the
first trial."

"I'm all right, thank you." And King sat up very straight in the car to
prove it. Nevertheless, when he was at home again he was not sorry to be
peremptorily ordered to lie supine on his back for at least three hours.

It was not long after this that King was able to bring about the thing
he most desired--a talk with Mrs. Burns. She came to see him one July
day, at his request, at an hour when he knew his mother must be away.
With her he went straight to his point; the moment the first greetings
were over and he had been congratulated on his ability to spend a few
hours each day at his desk, he began upon the subject uppermost in his
thoughts. He told her the story of his encounter with the girl in the
car, and asked her if she thought it could have been Miss Linton.

She looked at him musingly. "Do you prefer to think it was or was not?"
she asked.

"Are you going to answer accordingly?"

"Not at all. I was wondering which I wanted to think myself. I wish I
had been with you. I should have known."

"Would you?" King spoke eagerly. "Would you mind telling me how?"

"I can't tell you how. Of course I came to know her looks much better
than you; it really isn't strange that after seeing her only twice you
couldn't be sure. I don't think any change of dress or environment could
have hidden her from me. The question is, of course, why--if it was
she--she should have chosen not to seem to know you--unless--"

"Yes--"

She looked straight at him. "Unless--she is not the poor girl she seemed
to be. And that explanation doesn't appeal to me. I have known of poor
girls pretending to be rich, but I have never, outside of a sensational
novel, known a rich girl to pretend to be poor, unless for a visit to a
poor quarter for charitable purposes. What possible object could there
be in a girl's going about selling books unless she needed to do it? And
she allowed me--" She stopped, shaking her head. "No, Jordan, that was
not our little friend--or if it was, she was in that car by some curious
chance, not because she belonged there."

"So you're going on trusting her?" was King's abstract of these
reflections. He scanned her closely.

She nodded. "Until I have stronger proof to the contrary than your
looking into a pair of beautiful eyes. Have you never observed, my
friend, how many pairs of beautiful eyes there are in the world?"

He shook his head. "I haven't bothered much about them, except now and
then for a bit of nonsense making."

"But this pair you, too, are going to go on trusting?"

"I am. If that girl was Miss Linton she had a reason for not speaking.
If it wasn't"--he drew a deep breath--"well, I don't know exactly how to
explain that!"

"I do," said Ellen Burns, smiling. "She thought she would never see you
again, and she yielded to a girlish desire to look hard at--a real man."

It was this speech which, in spite of himself, lingered in King's mind
after she was gone, for the balm there was in it--a balm she had
perfectly understood and meant to put there. Well she guessed what his
disablement meant to him--in spite of the hope of complete recovery--how
little he seemed to himself like the man he was before.

Certainly it was nothing short of real manhood which prompted the talk
he had with his mother one day not long after this. She brought him a
letter, and she was scrutinizing it closely as she came toward him. He
was fathoms deep in his work and did not observe her until she spoke.

"Whom can you possibly have as a correspondent in this town, my son?"
she inquired, her eyes upon the postmark, which was that of a small city
a hundred miles away. It was one in which lived an old school friend of
whom she had never spoken, to her recollection, in King's hearing, for
the reason that the family had since suffered deep disgrace in the eyes
of the world, and she had been inexpressibly shocked thereby.

King looked up. He was always hoping for a word from Anne Linton, and
now, suddenly, it had come, just a week after the encounter with the
girl in the car--which had been going, as it happened, in the opposite
direction from the city of the postmark. He recognized instantly the
handwriting upon the plain, white business envelope--an interesting
handwriting, clear and black, without a single feminine flourish. He
took the letter in his hand and studied it.

"It is from Miss Linton," he said, "and I am very glad to hear from her.
It is the first time she has written since she went away--over two
months ago."

He spoke precisely as he would have spoken if it had been a letter from
any friend he had. It was like him to do this, and the surer another man
would have been to try to conceal his interest in the letter the surer
was Jordan King to proclaim it. The very fact that this announcement was
certain to rouse his mother's suspicion that the affair was of moment
to him was enough to make him tell her frankly that she was quite right.

He laid the letter on the desk before him unopened, and went on with his
work. Mrs. King stood still and looked at him a moment before moving
quietly away, and disturbance was written upon her face. She knew her
son's habit of finishing one thing before he took up another, but she
understood also that he wished to be alone when he should read this
letter. She left the room, but soon afterward she softly passed the open
door, and she saw that the letter lay open before him and that his head
was bent over it. The words before him were these:

     DEAR MR. KING:

     I had not meant to write to you for much longer than this, but
     I find myself so anxious to know how you are that I am
     yielding to the temptation. I may as well confess that I am
     just a little lonely to-night, in spite of having had a pretty
     good day with the little book--rather better than usual.
     Sometimes I almost wish I hadn't spent that fortnight with
     Mrs. Burns, I find myself missing her so. And yet, how can one
     be sorry for any happy thing that comes to one? As I look back
     on them now, though I am well and strong again, those days of
     convalescence in the hospital stand out as among the happiest
     in my life. The pleasant people, the flowers, the notes, all
     the incidents of that time, not the least among them Franz's
     music, stay in my memory like a series of pictures.

     Do you care to tell me how you come on? If so you may write to
     me, care of general delivery, in this town, at any time for
     the next five days. I shall be so glad to hear.

     ANNE LINTON.

King looked up as his mother approached. He folded the letter and put
it into his pocket.

"Mother," he said, "I may as well tell you something. You won't approve
of it, and that is why I must tell you. From the hour I first saw Miss
Linton I've been unable to forget her. I know, by every sign, that she
is all she seems to be. I can't let her go out of my life without an
effort to keep her. I'm going to keep her, if I can."

Two hours later R.P. Burns, M.D., was summoned to the bedside of Mrs.
Alexander King. He sat down beside the limp form, felt the pulse, laid
his hand upon the shaking shoulder of the prostrate lady, who had gone
down before her son's decision, gentle though his manner with her had
been. She had argued, prayed, entreated, wept, but she had not been able
to shake his purpose. Now she was reaping the consequences of her
agitation.

"My son, my only boy," she moaned as Burns asked her to tell him her
trouble, "after all these years of his being such a man, to change
suddenly into a willful boy again! It's inconceivable; it's not
possible! Doctor, you must tell him, you must argue with him. He can't
marry this girl, he can't! Why, he doesn't even know the place she comes
from, to say nothing of who she is--her family, her position in life.
She must be a common sort of creature to follow him up so; you know she
must. I can't have it; I will not have it! You must tell him so!"

Burns considered. There was a curious light in his eyes. "My dear lady,"
he said gently at length, "Jordan is a man; you can't control him. He is
a mighty manly man, too--as his frankly telling you his intention
proves. Most sons would have kept their plans to themselves, and simply
have brought the mother home her new daughter some day without any
warning. As for Miss Linton, I assure you she is a lady--as it seems to
me you must have seen for yourself."

"She is clever; she could act the part of a lady, no doubt," moaned the
one who possessed a clear title to that form of address. "But she might
be anything. Why didn't she tell you something of herself? Jordan could
not say that you knew the least thing about her. People with fine family
records are not so mysterious. There is something wrong about her--I
know it--I know it! Oh, I can't have it so; I can't! You must stop it,
Doctor; you must!"

"She spent two weeks in our home," Burns said. "During that time there
was no test she did not stand. Come, Mrs. King, you know that it doesn't
take long to discover the flaw in any metal. She rang true at every
touch. She's a girl of education, of refinement--why, Ellen came to feel
plenty of real affection for her before she left us, and you know that
means a good deal. As for the mystery about her, what's that? Most
people talk too much about their affairs. If, as we think, she has been
brought up in circumstances very different from these we find her in, it
isn't strange that she doesn't want to tell us all about the change."

But his patient continued to moan, and he could give her no consolation.
For a time he sat quietly beside the couch where lay the long and
slender form, and he was thinking things over. The room was veiled in a
half twilight, partly the effect of closing day and partly that of drawn
shades. The deep and sobbing breaths continued until suddenly Burns's
hand was laid firmly upon the hand which clutched a handkerchief wet
with many tears. He spoke now in a new tone, one she had never before
heard from him addressed to herself:

"This," he said, "isn't worthy of you, my friend."

It was as if her breath were temporarily suspended while she listened.
People were not accustomed to tell Mrs. Alexander King that her course
of action was unworthy of her.

"No man or woman has a right to dictate to another what he shall do,
provided the thing contemplated is not an offense against another. You
have no right to set your will against your son's when it is a matter
of his life's happiness."

She seized on this last phrase. "But that's why I do oppose him. I want
him to be happy--heaven knows I do! He can't be happy--this way."

"How do you know that? You don't know it. You are just as likely to make
him bitterly unhappy by opposing him as by letting him alone. And I can
tell you one thing surely, Mrs. King: Jordan will do as he wishes in
spite of you, and all you will gain by opposition will be not a gain,
but a sacrifice--of his love."

She shivered. "How can you think he will be so selfish?"

Burns had some ado to keep his rising temper down. "Selfish--to marry
the woman he wants instead of the woman you want? That's an old, old
argument of selfish mothers."

The figure on the couch stiffened. "Doctor Burns! How can you speak so,
when all I ask for is my son's best good?" The words ended in a wail.

"You think you do, dear lady. What you really want is--your own way."

Suddenly she sat up, staring at him. His clear gaze met her clouded one,
his sane glance confronted her wild one. She lifted her shaking hand
with a gesture of dismissal. But there was a new experience in store
for Jordan King's mother.

Burns leaned forward, and took the delicate hand of his hysterical
patient in his own.

"No, no," he said, smiling, "you don't mean that; you are not quite
yourself. I am Jordan's friend and yours. I have said harsh things to
you; it was the only way. I love your boy as I would a younger brother,
and I want you to keep him because I can understand what the loss of him
would mean to you. But you must know that you can't tie a man's heart to
you with angry commands, nor with tears and reproaches. You can tie
it--tight--by showing sympathy and understanding in this crisis of his
life. Believe me, I know."

His tone was very winning; his manner--now that he had said his
say--though firm, was gentle, and he held her hand in a way that did
much toward quieting her. Many patients in danger of losing self-control
had known the strengthening, soothing touch of that strong hand. Red
Pepper was not accustomed to misuse this power of his, which came very
near being hypnotic, but neither did he hesitate to use it when the
occasion called as loudly as did this one.

And presently Mrs. King was lying quietly on her couch again, her eyes
closed, the beating of her agitated pulses slowly quieting. And Burns,
bending close, was saying before he left her: "That's a brave woman.
Ladies are lovely things, but I respect women more. Only a mighty fine
one could be the mother of my friend Jord, and I knew she would meet
this issue like the Spartan she knows how to be."

If, as he stole away downstairs--leaving his patient in the hands of a
somewhat long-suffering maid--he was saying to himself things of a quite
different sort, let him not be blamed for insincerity. He had at the
last used the one stimulant against which most of us are powerless: the
call to be that which we believe another thinks us.




CHAPTER X

THE SURGICAL FIRING LINE


"Len, I've something great to tell you," announced Red Pepper Burns, one
evening in August, as he came out from his office where he had been
seeing a late patient, and joined his wife, who was wandering about her
garden in the twilight. "To-day I've had the compliment of my life. Whom
do you think I'm to operate on day after to-morrow?"

She looked up at him as he stood, his hands in his pockets, looking down
at her. In her sheer white frock, through which gleamed her neck and
arms, her hands full of pink and white snapdragon, she was worth
consideration. Her eyes searched his face and found there a curious
exultation of a very human sort. "How could I guess? Tell me."

"Who should you say was the very last man on earth to do me the honour
of trusting me in a serious emergency?"

She turned away her head, gazing down at a fragrant border of
mignonette, while he watched her, a smile on his lips. She looked up
again. "I can't think, Red. It seems to me everybody trusts you."

"Not by a long shot, or the rest of the profession would stand idle. But
there's one man who I should have said, to use a time-honoured phrase,
wouldn't let me operate on a sick cat. And he's the man who is going to
put his life in my hands Wednesday morning at ten o'clock. Len, if I am
ever on my mettle to do a perfect job, it'll be then!"

"Of course. But who--"

"I should think the name would leap to your lips. Who's mine ancient
enemy, the man who has fought me by politely sneering at me, and
circumventing me when he could, ever since I began practice, and whom
I've fought back in my way? Why, Len--"

Her dark eyes grew wide. "Red! Not--Doctor Van Horn?"

"Even so."

"Oh, Red! That is a compliment--and more than a compliment. But I should
never have thought of him somehow because, I suppose--"

"Because nobody ever thinks of a doctor's being sick or needing an
operation. But doctors do--sometimes--and usually pretty badly, too,
before they will submit to it. Van Horn's in dreadful shape, and has
been keeping it dark--until it's got the upper hand of him completely.
Mighty plucky the way he's been going on with his work, with trouble
gnawing at his vitals."

"How did he come to call you?"

"That's what I'm wondering. But call me he did, yesterday, and I've seen
him twice since. And when I told him what had to be done he took it like
a soldier without wincing. But when he said he wanted me to do the trick
you could have knocked me down with a lead pencil. My word, Len, I have
been doing Van an injustice all these years! The real stuff is in him,
after all, and plenty of it, too."

"It is he who has done you the injustice," Ellen said with a little lift
of the head.

"I know I have given you reason to think so--the times I've come home
raving mad at some cut of his. But, Len, that's all past and he wipes it
out by trusting me now. The biggest thing I've had against him was not
his knifing me but his apparent toadying to the rich and influential.
But there's another side to that and I see it now. Some people have to
be coddled, and though it goes against my grain to do it, I don't know
why a man who can be diplomatic and winning, like Van Horn, hasn't his
place just as much as a rough rider like me. Anyhow, the thing now is to
pull him through his operation, and if I can do it--well, Van and I
will be on a new basis, and a mighty comfortable one it will be."

His voice was eager and his wife understood just how his pulses were
thrilling, as do those of the born surgeon, at the approach of a great
opportunity.

"I'm very, very glad, dear," Ellen said warmly. "It's a real triumph of
faith over jealousy, and I don't wonder you are proud of such a
commission. I know you will bring him through."

"If I don't--but that's not to be thought of. It's a case that calls for
extremely delicate surgery and a sure hand, but the ground is plainly
mapped out and only some absolutely unforeseen complication is to be
dreaded. And when it comes to those complications--well, Len, sometimes
I think it must be the good Lord who works a man's brain for him at such
crises, and makes it pretty nearly superhuman. It's hard to account any
other way, sometimes, for the success of the quick decisions you make
under necessity that would take a lot of time to work out if you had the
time. Oh, it's a great game, Len, no doubt of that--when you win. And
when you lose"--he stopped short, staring into the shadows where a row
of dark-leaved laurel bushes shut away the garden in a soft
seclusio

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