to querulous complaints and long lists of
symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which
were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in
those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief
was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about
clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put
up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone. But hidden away
was a heart that behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang
and dreamed, and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the
street, and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the
vagus and accelerator nerves. Which are all any doctor really knows
about the heart, until he falls in love.

He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something
that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David's essential
rectitude helped him. David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy
one. He wished he were more like David.

The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth. Sometimes, in his
room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could
see in him to care about. He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so
sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation.
When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice
taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very
earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she
might admire.

He refused to think. He was content for a time simply to feel, to be
supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead. And
the old house seemed to brighten with him. Never had Lucy's window boxes
been so bright, or Minnie's bread so light; the sun poured into David's
sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that
David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.

And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day
he felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican--if he were
really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have
told him the story. No. That bridge was safely crossed. And Dick was
happy. David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick
came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time;
when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited
nonsen