any that held the best lots along the shore. He
was a comfortable family physician to have about, with a good
digestion and a desirable connection; in his few hours of recreation
he could be counted on for tennis or yachting or a dinner-party, even
with a dance attached.

One step that marked the prosperity of the Thorntons was their new
house on Beacon Street, selected with much care in the short block or
two of stable neighborhood. When they had moved into this new house,
Mrs. Thornton had referred to the past indirectly.

"Why don't you take the sewing-room?"

"What for? I can't entertain patients on the third floor."

"You could use it for a laboratory for your things," Mrs. Thornton
suggested vaguely. "I could get along without it."

The doctor smiled.

"Oh, I don't need so much room for that; I haven't over much time
these days."

It touched him that she remembered, even remotely, the bearing of that
tragic day when her sister had come to announce the Bradley rascality.
Soon she began again, this time nearer the heart of the matter.

"Jarvis, you don't mind it so very much, the change you had to make,
_now_."

"Now that I have more practice than I can attend to?"

The doctor's voice had an inexplicable tone in it at times which made
his wife shy of intimate conversation.

"You are such a success," she struggled on; "and everything has come
out so--peacefully."

"There are two verbs, my dear, which most people confuse: to succeed
and to win." Then, as he noted her troubled face, he kissed her. "That
bell has been ringing for half an hour. That is an outward and visible
sign of the first verb. I must heed it."

When he left her, she mused over his words. Except for occasional
disturbing moments like these, it never occurred to her that her
dreams made in that hot summer at the Four Corners had not come true
for them both. She had dreamed vaguely and she had realized vaguely.
When she contrasted her husband's career with her father's, or with
any other that made up the _repertoire_ among her acquaintances, it
seemed fair and unblemished. But men were exacting creatures, who
rarely knew what was best for them, and who kept about them a fund of
discontent to feed upon.

There was her poor father. He had given up now; Doctor Thornton saw
that his wife's parents did not starve. Ellwell was a melancholy
skeleton to meet on the streets, bent, walking stiffly at all his
joints, his fleshy cheeks fallen in