t the girl who opened the
door was pretty. He almost ignored her.

"How do you do, Miss Fay? I'm Dr. Thorley Masterman. I believe your
mother would like to see me. May I go to her at once?"

He was in the narrow hallway and at the foot of the stairs when she
said: "You can go right up. But perhaps I ought to tell you that she's
not--well, she's not very sick."

He looked at her inquiringly, getting the first faint impression of her
beauty. "What's the matter, then?"

"That's what we don't know." After a second's hesitation she added,
"Perhaps it's melancholy." Another second passed before she said, "We've
had a good deal of trouble."

The tone touched him. Her way of holding her head, rather meekly, rather
proudly, sufficiently averted to give him the curve of the cheek,
touched him, too. "What kind of trouble?"

"Oh, every kind. But she'll tell you about it herself. It's all she'll
talk about. That's why we can't do anything for her--and I don't believe
you can."

"I'd better see."

Following her directions given from the foot of the stairs, he entered a
barely furnished bedroom of which two sides leaned inward, to correspond
to the mansard grading of the roof. One window looked out on the
greenhouses, another toward Thorley's Pond. Beside the former, in a
high, upholstered arm-chair, sat a tall woman, fully dressed in black,
with a patchwork quilt of many colors across her knees. In spite of gray
hair slightly disheveled, and wild gray eyes, she was a handsome woman
who on a larger scale made him think of the girl down-stairs.

"How do you do, Mrs. Fay?" he began, feeling the burden of the situation
to be on himself. "I'm Dr. Thor--"

"I know who you are," the woman said, ungraciously. "If you hadn't been
a Masterman I shouldn't have sent for you."

He took a small chair, drawing it up beside her. "I know you've been
treated by my uncle Sim--"

"He's a fool. Tries to heal a broken heart by feeding it on rainbows."

Thor smiled. "That's like him. And yet rainbows have been known to heal
a broken heart before now."

"They won't heal mine. What I want is down on the solid earth." There
was a kind of desperate pleading in her face as she added, "Why can't I
have it?"

"That depends on what it is. If it's health--?"

"It's better than health."

He smiled. "I've always heard that health is pretty good, as things
go--"

"It's good enough. But there's something better, and that's patience. If
you've g