e Street; and now
her suit-case, packed, was in the hall.

"In one way, it will be a little better for you than if Christine and
Palmer were not in the house. You like Christine, don't you?"

"Very much."

"She likes you, K. She depends on you, too, especially since that night
when you took care of Palmer's arm before we got Dr. Max. I often think,
K., what a good doctor you would have been. You knew so well what to do
for mother."

She broke off. She still could not trust her voice about her mother.

"Palmer's arm is going to be quite straight. Dr. Ed is so proud of Max
over it. It was a bad fracture."

He had been waiting for that. Once at least, whenever they were
together, she brought Max into the conversation. She was quite
unconscious of it.

"You and Max are great friends. I knew you would like him. He is
interesting, don't you think?"

"Very," said K.

To save his life, he could not put any warmth into his voice. He would
be fair. It was not in human nature to expect more of him.

"Those long talks you have, shut in your room--what in the world do you
talk about? Politics?"

"Occasionally."

She was a little jealous of those evenings, when she sat alone, or
when Harriet, sitting with her, made sketches under the lamp to the
accompaniment of a steady hum of masculine voices from across the hall.
Not that she was ignored, of course. Max came in always, before he went,
and, leaning over the back of a chair, would inform her of the absolute
blankness of life in the hospital without her.

"I go every day because I must," he would assure her gayly; "but, I tell
you, the snap is gone out of it. When there was a chance that every cap
was YOUR cap, the mere progress along a corridor became thrilling." He
had a foreign trick of throwing out his hands, with a little shrug of
the shoulders. "Cui bono?" he said--which, being translated, means:
"What the devil's the use!"

And K. would stand in the doorway, quietly smoking, or go back to his
room and lock away in his trunk the great German books on surgery with
which he and Max had been working out a case.

So K. sat by the dining-room table and listened to her talk of Max that
last evening together.

"I told Mrs. Rosenfeld to-day not to be too much discouraged about
Johnny. I had seen Dr. Max do such wonderful things. Now that you are
such friends,"--she eyed him wistfully,--"perhaps some day you will come
to one of his operations. Even if you didn't un