sandwiches left," she warned him. The doctor stopped
laughing.

"Oh, please!" he said.

There was something very pleasant about him when he used that tone; a
persuasive charm, a trace of command. The girl liked it--and passed
a sandwich.

"Anyway it was you who took for granted that I was a tramp," he smiled
at her. "If I remember rightly I was hardly in a condition to contradict
you. Not but that it was a natural conclusion. I am curious to know why
you changed your mind."

"Oh! as soon as you fainted I knew. Tramps don't faint!"

"Not ever?"

"Well--hardly ever! And besides--look at your hands!"

The doctor looked, and blushed.

"Dirty?" he ventured.

"Not half dirty enough! And it wasn't only your hands. I noticed--oh!
lots of things!" For no perceptible reason a tiny blush fluttered
across the whiteness of her face like a roseleaf chased by the wind. The
pleasure of watching it made the doctor forget to answer, and the
girl went on:

"I know lots more about you than that you aren't a tramp. I know what
you are. You are a doctor!" triumphantly.

"A Daniel come to judgment!"

"Yes, a Daniel! Only I wouldn't have been quite so sure if you hadn't
dropped this out of your pocket." With a gleeful laugh she held up a
clinical thermometer.

The doctor laughed also. "Men have been hanged on less evidence than
that," he admitted. "All the same I don't know where it came from. Some
one must have judged me capable of wanting to take my own temperature.
Anything else?"

"Only general deductions. You are a doctor, you are going to
Coombe--deduction, you are the doctor who is going to buy out Dr.
Simmonds's practice."

Callandar scrambled up from his pillow with a look of delighted surprise
on his face.

"Why--so I am!" he exclaimed.

"You say that as if you had just found it out."

"Well, er--you see I had forgotten it--temporarily. My head, you know."

The suspicion in the girl's eyes melted into sympathy. "I suppose you
know," she said with quite a motherly air, "that old Doc. Simmonds
hasn't really any practice to sell?"

"No? That's bad. Hasn't he even a little one? You see" (the sympathy had
been so pleasant that he felt he could do with a little more of it), "I
could hardly manage a big one just now. As you may have noticed, my
health is rather rocky. Got to lay up and all that--so it's just as
well that old Simpkins' practice is on the ragged edge."

"The name is Simmonds, not Simpkins," coldl