ed. Beating
around in his mind for a graceful word of introduction, he accomplished
an abrupt and ungraceful one.

"Will you ride?" he asked.

"With pleasure," she responded simply, and in one light motion she was
in the seat beside him. He turned at low speed north, and as his hands
moved over wheels and levers, she was asking:

"How did you happen to be here?"

He put a bold front on it.

"I drove past your home, by instinct, because I was coming north. And I
saw you. Which of your spirits"--he was bold enough for the moment to
make light of her sacred places--"sent you out-of-doors just before I
passed?"

"The spirit of the night before," she answered, passing from smiles to
gravity. "That long sleep without rest has been troubling me again. I
remembered how exercise set me up in the country, and I started out for
a little air. Aunt Paula is out this morning--something about the
plumbing. Dear Auntie, how I'd love to take those cares off her
shoulders. She'll never let me, though. And next week our housekeeper,
whom we've held for two years, is leaving; she must advertise and
receive applicants--and likely get the wrong one. So that's another
worry for her. I was alone in the house when I awoke, and I could not
waste such autumn weather as this!"

He looked at her with anxiety--the physician again.

"I saw trouble in your face last night. It isn't normal that you should
be tired out so soon after the perfect condition you achieved at
Berkeley Center."

"No, it isn't. I know that perfectly, and I'm resigned to it."

"I won't ask you to let _me_ treat you--but why don't you go to some
physician about it? You know how much this case means to me."

For a time she did not reply. She only kept her eyes on the autumn
tints of the park, streaking past them like a gaudy Roman scarf.

"No," she said at length, "no physician like you can heal me. Greater
physicians, higher ones, for me. And they will not--will not--" She was
silent again.

"Are you coming back again to that queer business of which you told
me--that day on the tennis court?"

"To just that."

"What can such a thing have to do with your physical condition?"

"You will not laugh?"

"At you and yours and anything which touches you--no. You know I could
not laugh now. Little as I respect that obstacle, it is the most
serious fact I know."

His eyes were on the steering of the automobile. He could not see that
her lips pursed up as though to