past one as he dropped
Doctor Brainard at the Surgical, where he roomed. He was just driving off
when Miss Jacobs hurried out of the entrance.

"Oh, Mr. Brooks, wait a minute, please. Doctor Dempsy isn't resting very
well, and Miss Maxwell left word that if he called for you, you could sit
with him. We can't get him to sleep, and he does want you."

"All right. I'll leave the car and come back."

As Peter took his chair again by his friend's bedside his face was set to
as strong a purpose as Sheila O'Leary's had shown that day in the
sanitarium grounds. "Want me to talk, old man?" he asked, quietly. "Maybe
I can yarn you into forty winks. Shall I try?"

"Wish you would. It's funny how a man can go through this with a thousand
or so patients and it seems like an every-day affair, but when it's
himself--well, there's the rub." And the doctor smiled a bit sheepishly at
his own ungovernable nerves.

Peter gripped his hand understandingly. "I know. It's the difference
between fiction and autobiography as far as it touches your own sense of
reality. Well, to-night shall we try fiction? Ever since they pulled me
through here, I've had my mind on a yarn with a sanitarium or hospital for
a background and a doctor for a hero. All this atmosphere gets into your
blood. It keeps you guessing until you have to spin a yarn and use up the
material."

"Anything for copy, hey?" the doctor chuckled.

"That's about it. Well, my yarn runs about this way." With the skill of an
artist and the sympathy of a humanist--and the suppressed excitement of
one who has something at stake--Peter drew his two principal characters,
the conscientious, sensitive doctor possessed with the constant fear of
that hypothetical case he might lose some day, and the smooth, scheming
man a few years his senior who wanted to get his fellow-practitioner out
of the way and marry the girl they both loved. Peter made the girl as
adorable as a man in love might picture her.

"For a sixpence I'd wager you had fallen in love yourself." Doctor Dempsy
chuckled again. "I never before knew you to be so keen over feminine
charms."

"Just more copy," and Peter went on with the tale. "Well, the young chap's
horror and fear kept growing with each new case, and the other chap kept
sneering and suggesting that his nerves weren't fit, and his hand wasn't
steady, and he worked too slowly. He kept it up until he got what he
wanted; the young chap bungled his operation and lo