octor's duty to save life at all costs, and no consideration of any
other kind should make him do otherwise. Father was quite sure that the
man would die if his arm were not taken off, and that was why he
performed the operation in spite of the disapproval of the man's
friends."

"It was, as you say, his duty to do his best for his patient, and it is
hard lines that he should have to suffer for just having done his duty,"
said the doctor. "But why can you not put this in a letter, and let me
send it to Mostyn for you the first thing in the morning?"

"Because I am afraid that Father would not read it," admitted Nealie,
first flushing and then paling, as she looked up at the doctor with her
fearless gaze. "I think that Father is so beaten by everything that he
has had to bear that he just feels as if he will give up and not trouble
about anything more. So that to know all his big family have suddenly
been dumped upon him will be a sort of a shock; but if I am there to
assure him that we shall be more help than hindrance he may feel better
about it all. Of course there are a lot of us, and we have fearfully big
appetites too, except Rupert, but there are so many ways of earning
one's living here that I think we shall soon be able to support
ourselves, that is, Sylvia, Rupert, and I, for of course the others will
have to go to school."

"You are very courageous, and I think perhaps you are right in wanting
to go to your father, and if you will leave it to me I will see what
arrangements I can make for your journey," said the doctor, and Nealie
thanked him, feeling that bad as things were they might easily have been
worse if they had not found a friend like her father's successor, who by
such a strange coincidence bore the same name.

Rupert had experienced such relief from the fomentations that he lay in
a quiet sleep, and Nealie, with her head on the pillow at his side,
slumbered also; but the doctor had gone to the outer room, and was very
busy looking up his case book and trying to make up his mind whether he
dared leave his patients long enough to go with Nealie to find her
father.

His private fear was that when she reached Mostyn she would find that
her father had gone somewhere else. Doctors in mining camps were apt to
be nomadic creatures, that is, they had to go to their patients, and it
was no use to stay where the people were all well, when perhaps at some
place fifty or a hundred miles distant men and wome