es above ninety nor below forty. You can hire all the labor you
want at a few cents a day."

Mary's diligent eye detected a cloud on the Doctor's face. But John,
though nettled, pushed on the more rapidly.

"A man can make--easily!--a thousand dollars the first year, and live on
two hundred and fifty. It's the place for a poor man."

He looked a little defiant.

"Of course," said Mary, "I know you wouldn't come to an opinion"--she
smiled with the same restless glance--"until you had made all the
inquiries necessary. It mu--must--be a delightful place. Doctor?"

Her eyes shone blue as the sky.

"I wouldn't send a convict to such a place," said Dr. Sevier.

Richling flamed up.

"Don't you think," he began to say with visible restraint and a faint,
ugly twist of the head,--"don't you think it's a better place for a poor
man than a great, heartless town?"

"This isn't a heartless town," said the Doctor.

"He doesn't mean it as you do, Doctor," interposed Mary, with alarm.
"John, you ought to explain."

"Than a great town," said Richling, "where a man of honest intentions
and real desire to live and be useful and independent; who wants to earn
his daily bread at any honorable cost, and who can't do it because the
town doesn't want his services, and will not have them--can
go"-- He ceased, with his sentence all tangled.

"No!" the Doctor was saying meanwhile. "No! No! No!"

"Here I go, day after day," persisted Richling, extending his arm and
pointing indefinitely through the window.

"No, no, you don't, John," cried Mary, with an effort at gayety; "you
don't go by the window, John; you go by the door." She pulled his arm
down tenderly.

"I go by the alley," said John. Silence followed. The young pair
contrived to force a little laugh, and John made an apologetic move.

"Doctor," he exclaimed, with an air of pleasantry, "the whole town's
asleep!--sound asleep, like a negro in the sunshine! There isn't work
for one man in fifty!" He ended tremulously. Mary looked at him with
dropped face but lifted eyes, handling the fan, whose rent she had made
worse.

"Richling, my friend,"--the Doctor had never used that term
before,--"what does your Italian money-maker say to the idea?"

Richling gave an Italian shrug and his own pained laugh.

"Exactly! Why, Mr. Richling, you're on an island now,--an island in
mid-ocean. Both of you!" He waved his hands toward the two without
lifting his head from the back of the e