u're
interrupting another one!" He laughed delightedly.

"I?" inquired Roderick. "How was that?"

"Oh, Ed wouldn't say so. He'd be sure it was the hand of Providence.
It was the time you went off hunting the rainbow and got lost, don't
you remember? and your father got sick on the head of it. Ed stayed
home that time."

"But it was Jock McPherson who came to poor father's rescue that time,"
said Roderick. "Lawyer Ed told me himself."

Doctor Blair made a grimace.

"Roderick McRae," he said, after a moment, "I have a fatal weakness. I
suppose it's the poet in me. I like to think it is. I'm forever
pouring out the thoughts of my inmost heart which I really ought to
keep to myself. That was the way with Bobby ye mind:

'_Is there a whim-inspired fool
Owre fast for thought, owe hot for rule._'

And here I've been telling tales I should keep tae ma'sel!"

"Well, you've got to finish, now that you've started," cried Roderick.
"Do you mean to tell me that Lawyer Ed--"

"No, I don't mean to tell you anything, but I've done it, and I might
as well make a full confession. Of course it was Lawyer Ed did it. He
always does things like that, he's got them scattered all over the
country."

"But--why didn't I know?" cried Roderick sharply. "And what did he do?"

"Because he didn't want it. I'm the only person in Algonquin that
knows, except J. P., of course. J. P. knows the innermost thoughts
that pass through Ed's mind. There's another secret between us three."
He smiled half-sadly. "I suppose, though, your father knows this
one--that Ed was to have married J. P.'s only sister. She was tall and
willowy and just like a flower, and she died a week before the wedding
day. They buried her in her white satin wedding dress with her veil
and orange blossoms." Archie Blair's voice had sunk to a tender
whisper. "I saw her in her coffin, with a white lily in her hand."

He was silent so long that Roderick brought him back to the starting
point. "But you haven't told me yet how he helped Father."

So Archie Blair began at the beginning and told him all, happily
unconscious of how he was harrowing Roderick's feelings in the telling.
It was the old story of his father's mortgage, his own hunt for the
rainbow, which, the doctor declared, argued that he should have been a
poet, his father's illness, and Lawyer Ed's postponement of his trip,
and greatest of all, his setting aside of the chance to leave Algonq