by an aged widower with grown
children and quantities of money, one of her patients.

She sat very demurely in the waiting-room with a magazine in her lap,
and told her aged patient that she admired and respected him, but that
she had given herself to the suffering poor.

"Everything in the world that you want," begged the elderly gentleman.
"You should see the world, child, and I will see it again through your
eyes. To Paris first for clothes and the opera, and then--"

"But I do not love you," Sidney replied, mentally but steadily. "In all
the world I love only one man. He is--"

She hesitated here. It certainly was not Joe, or K. Le Moyne of the
gas office. It seem to her suddenly very sad that there was no one
she loved. So many people went into hospitals because they had been
disappointed in love.

"Dr. Wilson will see you now."

She followed Miss Harrison into the consulting room. Dr. Max--not the
gloved and hatted Dr. Max of the Street, but a new person, one she had
never known--stood in his white office, tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired,
competent, holding out his long, immaculate surgeon's hand, and smiling
down at her.

Men, like jewels, require a setting. A clerk on a high stool, poring
over a ledger, is not unimpressive, or a cook over her stove. But place
the cook on the stool, poring over the ledger! Dr. Max, who had lived
all his life on the edge of Sidney's horizon, now, by the simple
changing of her point of view, loomed large and magnificent. Perhaps
he knew it. Certainly he stood very erect. Certainly, too, there was
considerable manner in the way in which he asked Miss Harrison to go out
and close the door behind her.

Sidney's heart, considering what was happening to it, behaved very well.

"For goodness' sake, Sidney," said Dr. Max, "here you are a young lady
and I've never noticed it!"

This, of course, was not what he had intended to say, being staff and
all that. But Sidney, visibly palpitant, was very pretty, much prettier
than the Harrison girl, beating a tattoo with her heels in the next
room.

Dr. Max, belonging to the class of man who settles his tie every time he
sees an attractive woman, thrust his hands into the pockets of his long
white coat and surveyed her quizzically.

"Did Dr. Ed tell you?"

"Sit down. He said something about the hospital. How's your mother and
Aunt Harriet?"

"Very well--that is, mother's never quite well." She was sitting forward
on her chair, her