re entering the house. He had not wanted coffee on the road, yet
coffee served with the crisp odor of bacon accompanying its aroma, after
his bath and return to ranch clothes, found no appetite. He was as a man
whose mind cannot hold fast to anything that he is doing. Firio,
restless, worried, his eyes flicking covert glances, was frequently in
and out of the living-room on one excuse or another.

"What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes.
"What has Senor Jack planned for us to do?"

"The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the
mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table.

"And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly.

"No!" Jack answered to space.

The pyramid of mail might have been a week's batch for the Doge himself.
At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack
had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge's list.
There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile's
intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a
blank receipt to be filled in. He tore off the wrappers of the magazines
as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into
balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the
magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him. His
aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment.

When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, "Come in!" but,
contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to
meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt
was well masked.

There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in
soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for
negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a
western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as
a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he
had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance
which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow
physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that
was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly
impressed.

"Hello, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the
time of day with Jim Galway in the street.

"He