aid fervently. "Did she hurt you so much,
Jimmie dear?"

"I wanted her," Jimmie answered slowly, "but I think it was because I
thought she was mine,--that I could make her mine. When I found she
was Peter's,--had been Peter's all the time, the thought somehow cured
me. She was dead right, you know. I made it up out of the stuff that
dreams are made of. God knows I love her, but--but that personal thing
has gone out of it. She's my little lost child,--or my sister. A man
wants his own to be his own, Gertrude."

"Yes, I know."

"My--my real trouble is that I'm at sea again. I thought that I
cared,--that I was anchored for good. It's the drifting that plays the
deuce with me. If the thought of that sweet child and the grief at her
loss can't hold me, what can? What hope is there for me?"

"I don't know," Gertrude laughed.

"Don't laugh at me. You've always been on to me, Gertrude, too much so
to have any respect for me, I guess. You've got your work," he waved
his arm at the huge cast under the shadow of which they were sitting,
"and all this. You can put all your human longings into it. I'm a poor
rudderless creature without any hope or direction." He buried his face
in his hands. "You don't know it," he said, with an effort to conceal
the fact that his shoulders were shaking, "but you see before you a
human soul in the actual process of dissolution."

Gertrude crossed her studio floor to kneel down beside him. She drew
the boyish head, rumpled into an irresistible state of curliness, to
her breast.

"Put it here where it belongs," she said softly.

"Do you mean it?" he whispered. "Sure thing? Hope to die? Cross your
heart?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Praise the Lord."

"I snitched him," Gertrude confided to Margaret some days later,--her
whole being radiant and transfigured with happiness. "You snitch
David."

CHAPTER XXIII

THE YOUNG NURSE

The local hospital of the village of Harmonville, which was ten miles
from Harmon proper, where the famous boarding-school for young ladies
was located, presented an aspect so far from institutional that but
for the sign board tacked modestly to an elm tree just beyond the
break in the hedge that constituted the main entrance, the gracious,
old colonial structure might have been taken for the private residence
for which it had served so many years.

It was a crisp day in late September, and a pale yellow sun was spread
thin over the carpet of yellow leaves with