tates and Doctor John within a few days of
Appomattox. But one would have said, looking at them here at the
breakfast table on a morning in March in the year 1919, that there was a
good deal more than those ten years between them. He folded his paper and
sat down when the butler suggestively pulled out his chair for him and
his manner became, for the moment, absent, as his eye fell upon a letter
beside his plate addressed in his daughter, Mary's, handwriting.

"I want a big platter of ham and eggs, Nat, sliced thick. And a few of
Lucartha's wheat cakes." He made some sort of good-humored, half
articulate acknowledgment of the old servitor's pleasure in getting such
an order, but one might have seen that his mind was a little out of
focus, for it was not exactly dealing with the letter either. He sliced
it open with a table knife with the precise movement one would have
expected from a surgeon and disengaged it in the same neat way from its
envelope. But he read it as if he weren't very sharply aware of what,
particularly, it had to say and he laid it beside his plate again without
any comment.

"Did you have any sleep last night, at all?" Miss Wollaston asked.

It brought him back like a flash. "Not a wink," he said jovially.

This was a challenge and the look that went with it, one of clear boyish
mischief, was one that none of John Wollaston's other intimates--and
among these I include his beautiful young wife and his two grown-up
children by an earlier marriage--ever saw. It was a special thing for
this sister who had been a stately young lady of twenty when he was a bad
little boy of ten. She had watched him, admiring yet rather aghast, ever
since then.

To the world at large his social charm lay in--or was at least
inseparable from--his really exquisite manners, his considerateness, the
touch of old-fashioned punctilio there was about him. His first wife
would have agreed with her successor about his possession of this quality
though they would have appraised it rather differently. Only this elderly
unmarried sister of his felt the fascination of the horrible about him.

This was to some extent inherent in his profession. He had a reputation
that was growing to amount to fame as a specialist in the very wide
field of gynecology, obstetrics and abdominal surgery. The words
themselves made Miss Wollaston shudder.

When he replied to her question, whether or not he had had any sleep at
all, with an open grin an