intermarried. If from the process of intermarriage the Fays were, on the
whole, excluded, the discrimination lay in some obscure instinct for
affinity of which no one at the time was able to forecast the
significance.

But by 1910 there was a difference, the difference apparent when out of
the flat farmlands seismic explosion has thrown up a range of mountain
peaks. For the expansion of the country which the middle nineteenth
century had wrought, the Thorleys, Mastermans, Willoughbys, and Brands
had been on the alert, with eyes watchful and calculations timed. The
Fays, on the other hand, had gone on with the round of seed-time and
harvest, contented and almost somnolent, awakening to find that the ages
had been giving them the chances that would never come again. It was
across the wreck of those chances, and across some other obstacles
besides, that Thorley Masterman, for the first time since childhood,
looked into the gray-green eyes of Rosie Fay and got the thrill of their
wide-open, earnest beauty.

He was then not far from thirty years of age, having studied at a great
American university, in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and obtained other
sorts of knowledge of mankind. He knew Rosie Fay, in this secondary,
grown-up phase of their acquaintance, as the daughter of his first
patient, and he had obtained his first patient through the kindly
intervention of Uncle Sim. From February to November, 1910, his
"shingle" had hung in one of the two streets of the village without
attracting a patient at all. He had already begun to feel his position a
trial when his half-brother's daily jest turned it into a humiliation.

"Must be serious matter, Thor," Claude would say, "to be responsible for
so many valuable lives."

Mr. Leonard Willoughby, his father's partner in the old
"banking-and-broking" house of Toogood & Masterman, enjoyed the same
sort of chaff. "Looking pale, Thor. Must be working too hard."

"Never mind, Thor," Mrs. Willoughby would encourage him. "When I'm ill
you shall get me--but then I'm never ill."

At such minutes her daughter Lois could only smile sympathetically and
talk hurriedly of something else. As he had meant since boyhood to marry
Lois Willoughby when the moment for marriage came, Thor counted this
tactfulness in her favor.

Nevertheless, he was puzzled. Having disregarded his future possession
of money and prepared himself for a useful career with all the
thoroughness he could command, nobody