Shall we wait till it rises?"

"Yes," she answered, feeling the great gentleness that there was about
him when he was in a serious way.

Why he had not been successful in the profession for which nature
plainly had designed him she could not understand; for he was a man to
inspire confidence when he was at his best, and unvexed by the memory of
the bitter waters which had passed his lips. She felt that there would
be immeasurable solace in his hand for one who suffered; she knew that
he would put down all that he had in life for a friend.

Leaning her chin upon her palm, she looked at him in the last light of
the west, which came down to them dimly, as if falling through dun
water, from some high-floating clouds. As if following in her thought
something that had gone before, she said:

"No; perhaps you should not stay in this big, empty country when there
are crowded places in the world that are full of pain, and little
children in them dying for the want of such men as you."

He started and turned toward her, putting out his hand as if to place it
upon her head.

"How did you know that it's the children that give me the strongest call
back to the struggle?" he asked.

"It's in your eyes," said she. And beneath her breath she added: "In
your heart."

"About all the success that I ever won I sacrificed for a child," he
said, with reminiscent sadness.

"Will you tell me about it?"

"It was a charity case at that," he explained, "a little girl who had
been burned in a fire which took all the rest of the family. She needed
twenty-two square inches of skin on her breast. One gave all that he
could very well part with----"

"That was yourself," she nodded, drawing a little nearer to him quite
unconsciously.

"But that was not half enough," he continued as if unaware of the
interruption. "I had to get it into the papers and ask for volunteers,
for you know that an average of only one in three pieces of cuticle
adheres when set into a wound, especially a burn. The papers made a good
deal of it, and I couldn't keep my name out, of course. Well, enough
school-children came forward to patch up three or four girls, and
together we saved her.

"No matter. The medical association of that city jumped me very promptly.
The old chaps said that I had handled the case unprofessionally and had
used it merely for an advertisement. They charged unprofessional
conduct against me; they tried me in their high court and found me