d diagnose correctly and prescribe successfully.

When he came to Millford years ago, his practice grew rapidly. People
wondered why he came to such a small place, for his skill, his wit, his
wonderful presence would have won distinction anywhere.

His wife, a frail though very beautiful woman, at first thought nothing
of his drinking habits--he was never anything but gentlemanly in her
presence. But the time came when she saw honour and manhood slowly but
surely dying in him, and on her heart there fell the terrible weight of
a powerless despair. Her health had never been robust and she quickly
sank into invalidism.

The specialist who came from Winnipeg diagnosed her case as chronic
anaemia and prescribed port wine, which she refused with a queer little
wavering cry and a sudden rush of tears. But she put up a good fight
nevertheless. She wanted to live so much, for the sake of Mary, her
beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.

Mrs. Barner did not live to see the whole work of degeneration, for the
end came in the early spring, swift and sudden and kind.

The doctor's grief for his wife was sincere. He always referred to her
as "my poor Mildred," and never spoke of her except when comparatively
sober.

Mary Barner took up the burden of caring for her father without
question, for she loved him with a great and pitying love, to which he
responded in his best moments. In the winter she went with him on his
drives night and day, for the fear of what might happen was always in
her heart. She was his housekeeper, his office-girl, his bookkeeper;
she endured all things, loneliness, poverty, disgrace, without
complaining or bitterness.

One day shortly after Mrs. Barner's death big John Robertson from "the
hills" drove furiously down the street to the doctor's house, and
rushed into the office without ringing the bell. His little boy had
been cut with the mower-knives, and he implored the doctor to come at
once.

The doctor sat at his desk, just drunk enough to be ugly-tempered, and
curtly told Mr. Robertson to go straight to perdition, and as the poor
man, wild with excitement, begged him to come and offered him money, he
yawned nonchalantly, and with some slight variations repeated the
injunction.

Mary hearing the conversation came in hurriedly.

"Mary, my dear," the doctor said, "please leave us. This gentleman is
quite forgetting himself and his language is shocking." Mary did not
even look at her father. She w