, some limping
upon crutches, all snatching at hope of life and health and happiness
again. Needley, perforce, had become a vast boarding house, as it
were--there were few homes indeed that did not harbor their quota of
those who sought the "cure."

But there were others too who came--who were not sick--who had not
faith--who came to laugh and peer and peek. Pleasure yachts dropped
their anchors in the cove around the headland from the Patriarch's
cottage--and their dingeys brought women decked out _de rigeur_ in middy
blouses and sailor collars, and nattily attired gentlemen whose only
claim to seamanship was the clothes, or rather, the costumes that they
wore.

They came laughing, supercilious, tolerant, contemptuous, pitying the
inanity of those they held less strongly-minded than themselves who
should be taken in by so apparent, glaring and monstrous a fake. They
came because it was the rage, the thing to do, quite the thing to do,
quite a necessary part of the summer's itinerary. But that they, should
they have been sick, would ever have dreamed of coming there was too
perfectly ridiculous an idea for words. How strange a thing is the human
animal!

They came in their rather cruel, merciless gaiety--and they left sobered
and impressed; the ladies holding their embroidered parasols at a less
jaunty angle; the men with lightened pockets, their names enrolled in
the contribution book in that quiet, simple room, whose door was open,
whose cash-box was unguarded, where none asked them to either enter or
withdraw. They came and found no air of charlatanism such as they had
looked for--only a peaceful, unostentatious, patient air of sincerity
that left them remorseful and abashed. They came and went, a source of
revenue not counted on or thought of before by Madison; but a source
that swelled the coffers, brimming fuller day by day, to overflowing.

In three weeks from the night of Mrs. Thornton's death, which had had at
least no visible effect on Needley, Needley was metamorphosed--with a
spontaneity, so to speak, that astounded even Madison himself--into
something that approximated very closely in reality the word-picture he
had drawn of it that night in the Roost. Madison looked upon his work
and saw that it was pleasing beyond his dreams. Money was pouring in--no
single breath of suspicion came to disquiet him. Even the cures were
working satisfactorily--even Pale Face Harry, who had become great
friends with the