he case, as it were.

"Mr. Dulany's habits," the great doctor began, "I should say, after such
superficial investigation as I have been able to make, may be cured. One
thing I have noted with pleasure. He has lost none of his mental
integrity. He is capable of the truth concerning himself. Generally
those given to the alcoholic habit deny everything or secrete everything
concerning it when sober. Sometimes they are sentimental over it, given
to self-pity, with even a certain desire for dramatic effects in the
statements about themselves. Dulany is still, so far as I can judge,
honest. To-day he told me the history of himself, with a gay humor in
the telling. He is a descendant, it seems, of the great and the gifted.
There are lawless loves behind him, a picturesque ancestry, artistic
and, on the wrong side of the blanket, aristocratic as well."

"It is the ancestry of genius," Francis answered.

"It is the ancestry of Katrine Dulany," Dr. Johnston returned, looking
at Frank with an untranslatable smile.

A silence fell between them, broken at length by the doctor. "I have
decided to take Mr. Dulany to New York with me. I shall keep him near me
as long as is necessary. If there is no organic trouble, of which I have
some fear, the case will be simple enough, if there is the desire in him
to help me. He was keen to have his daughter go with him, but I told him
frankly it was better that she should not go. He leans too much on her.
He must strengthen his own will; he must learn to rely on himself."

As the doctor spoke it was not of Patrick Dulany that Francis thought,
but of Katrine. The people were coming on the twenty-seventh; it was
now but the seventeenth. He would have her to himself for ten days, ten
days of those caressing eyes, of the charming voice and open adulation,
and then? He closed his eyes to whatever lay beyond. He would go away to
keep his engagements and forget. He always had forgotten; he would, he
thought, be able always to forget.

And the ten days were his; days on the river fishing by the Indian
Rocks, or drifting with the current under the dogwoods' white, open
faces down to the falls; days with lunches in the rose-garden, and Abt
and Schubert songs under the pines at twilight, when their hands touched
in the exchange of a flower or a book and lingered in the touching; when
their eyes had learned the answering of each other with no spoken word.
And the question and answer were the same in the