oined Dr. Slavens.

"I couldn't sleep," she explained. "Every time I shut my eyes I could
see that poor old gambler's body lying there with the coat over his
face!"

"I don't feel either pity or pain in his case," said the doctor; "or,
when it comes to that, for the other one, either."

"Well, you couldn't have prevented it, anyway," she sighed.

"And wouldn't have if I could," he declared. "I looked on them as one
poison fighting another, as we set them to do in the human system. When
one overcomes the other, and the body throws them both out, health
follows."

"Do you think Jerry will recover?"

"There's a chance for him," he replied.

"For his mother's sake I hope he will," she said. "I went to see her,
remembering in the midst of my distress her kind face and gentle heart.
I'm glad that I went, although my mission failed."

"No, nothing fails," he corrected gently. "What looks to us like failure
from our side of it is only the working out of the plan laid down a long
time ahead. We may never see the other side of the puzzle, but if we
could see it we'd find that our apparent failure had been somebody
else's gain. It's the balance of compensation. Your thought of Boyle's
mother, and your ride to appeal to her in my behalf, worked out in
bringing his father here at a time when Jerry needed him as he never may
need him in his life again."

"It was a strange coincidence," she reflected.

"We call such happenings that for want of a better name, or for the
short-sightedness which keeps us from applying the proper one," said he.
"It's better that you have concluded to give up the City of Refuge.
You'll not need it now."

"It was a foolish undertaking, romantic and impossible, from the very
beginning," she owned. "I never could have put it through."

"It would have carried many a heartache with it, and many a hard and
lonely day," said he. "And so we are both back where we were, so far as
landed possessions go in this country, at the beginning."

"I've lost considerable by my foolish dream," she confessed with
regret.

"And I have gained everything," he smiled, taking her hand in his.

The world around them seemed to be too grave to look kindly on any
love-passages of tenderness or kisses, or triflings such as is the
common way of a man with a maid. In that moment when hand touched hand
she looked up into his eyes with warm softness glowing in her own, and
on her lips stood an invitation which his heart s