morrow. Don't forget it, ma'am. America has that kind of justice
when it hasn't any other--that it makes everybody take their turn. It's
ours now; but you'll get yours as sure as life is life."

Lois looked at Thor. "Can you make out what he means?"

"I can make out that he's very much mistaken--"

"Mistaken, Dr. Thor? I don't see how you can say that. I wasn't mistaken
the night I saw you creeping into that hothouse over there, where you
knew my little girl was at work. I wasn't mistaken when I saw you creep
away. Still less was I mistaken when I stole in after you had gone, and
found her with her arms on the desk, and her head bowed down on them,
and she crying fit to kill herself. That was just a few days before she
heard you was going to marry this lady--and she's never been the same
child since. Always troubled--always something on her mind. Not once
since that night have you darkened these doors, though you'd had a
patient here. Have you, now?"

"I didn't come," Thor stammered, "because Dr. Hilary had done all that
was necessary for Mrs. Fay, and--and I've been away."

"But if you didn't come," Fay went on, with the mildness that was more
forcible than wrath, "some one else did. You'd left a good substitute.
He's finished the work that you began. He was here with her an hour last
Wednesday morning--just after I'd warned him off for good and all."

Thor started. "Let me go to her."

But Fay stood in his way. "No, sir. To see you would be the finishing
touch. She can't hear your name without a shiver going through her from
head to foot. We've tried it on her. Between the two of you--your
brother and you--it's you she's most afraid of." There was silence for a
second, while he turned his gray face first to the one and then to the
other of his two listeners. "Why couldn't you all have let her be? What
were you after? What have you got out of it? _I_ can't see."

"Fay, I swear to you that we never wanted anything but her good," Thor
cried, with a passion that made Lois turn her troubled eyes on him
searchingly. "If my brother hasn't told you what he meant, I'll do it
now. He wanted to marry Rosie. He _was_ to have married her. If there's
trouble between them, it's all a mistake. Just let me see her--"

But Fay dismissed this as idle talk. "No, Dr Thor. Stories of that kind
don't do any good. Your brother never wanted to marry her, or meant to,
either--not any more than you. What you did want and what you did me