n within a day or two."

Burns hesitated an instant, changing colour. Then: "Are you sure you'd
better have me?" he asked, a trifle huskily.

The other looked him in the eye. "Why not? I know of nobody so
competent. Come, man put that Satan of unreasonable self-reproach behind
you. When man becomes omniscient and omnipotent there'll be no errors in
his judgment or his performance--and not before. Meanwhile we're all in
the soup of fallibility together. I--I'm not much at expressing myself
elegantly: but I trust I'm sufficiently forcible," smiled Buller.
"Er--will you meet me at four at my office? We'll go to the Arnolds'
together, and I'll give you the history of the case on the way. It's a
corker, I assure you, and it's keeping me awake nights."

Proceeding on his way alone in the Imp he had not wanted even Johnny
Caruthers's company to-day Burns found the heaviness of his spirit
lifting slightly very slightly. Tenderness toward the little lost
patient who had loved and trusted him so well began gradually to
usurp the place of the black hatred of what he felt to be his own
incompetency. Passing a florist's shop he suddenly felt like giving that
which, as it had occurred to him before, had seemed to him would be only
a mockery from his hands. He went in and selected flowers--dozens and
dozens of white rosebuds, fresh and sweet--and sent them, with no card
at all, to her home.

Then he drove on to his next patient, to find himself surrounded by an
eager group of happy people, all rejoicing in what appeared to them to
be a marvelous deliverance from a great impending danger, entirely due
to his own foresight and skill. He knew well enough that it way Nature
herself who had come to the rescue, and frankly told them so. But they
continued to thrust the honour upon him, and he could but come away with
a softened heart.

"I'll go on again," he said to himself. "I've got to go on. Last night I
thought I couldn't, but, of course, that's nonsense. The best I can God
knows I try... And I'll never make that mistake again... But oh!--little
Lucile--little Lucille!"

CHAPTER X. IN WHICH HE PROVES HIMSELF A HOST

"Winifred," said R. P. Burns, invading Mrs. Arthur Chester's sunny
living-room one crisp October morning, leather cap in hand, "I'm going
to give a dinner to-night. Stag dinner for Grant, of Edinburgh--man who
taught me half the most efficient surgery I know. He's over here, and
I've just found it out. Only bee