of uncertain age which steered with a lever and
heaved prodigiously, who wrote prescriptions to be filled at the
drug-store. If Doctor Meal were not among his bees, or grafting pear
buds, he might be found in a tilted chair on the sidewalk, beneath the
giant locust trees which shaded the town's one pharmacy. But Doctor
Stone's telephone was invariably answered by a trained servant who, if
he were away, knew exactly where to find him. Perhaps in no other
respects was the changing life of Buckville better illustrated than by
these two doctors: the old and the new; the passing and the coming. And
because it was the passing, Doctor Meal had not yet gone as far as the
post office for his mail; but in less than an hour after the stamp had
been cancelled on Stone's invitation, the Colonel received his
acceptance by telephone.

"Well," Brent sighed, "I've got to get 'em somewhere!"

"You might gallop up stairs on the four you have," the Colonel
suggested. "Our guests will soon be arriving."

"And Dale will beat you down," Jane called from the library.

"Oh, Jane, I'm all in," he groaned. "I can't, honest!"

"Are you so much more tired than Dale?" she asked sweetly.

"Certainly not," he flushed.

He pushed himself slowly out of the chair and went to the French
window.

"Where are you?" he began asking before stepping through. "I want some
encouragment to climb those stairs!"

She was sitting, balanced lightly on the library table, with her hands
clasped about one knee.

"What an old man you've suddenly become," she laughed.

"You'd be an old man, too," he said, "if you'd been paced all day by a
camel!"

"I thought engineers were inured to those things;--I thought they could
withstand all manner of hardships;--that, really, the elements
themselves were playthings in their hands!"

He leaned against the table and looked down at her. That toddy, put into
his tired and empty frame, was gripping him with surprising activity.

"No," he slowly replied. "Engineers can't master all the elements;--at
least, I know one who can't. I wish he could!"

She may have flushed slightly, but her chin kept its tantalizing tip and
her eyes their laughing mischief.

"One never knows what one can do until one tries," she said; and after a
dangerous hesitation, added: "I believe this is the first day you've
really attempted any serious work since you came."

Now, when a girl balances on the edge of a table in a softly lighted
room,