seemed to want him. It was not
that the village was over-provided with doctors. Every one admitted that
it wasn't--otherwise he would not have settled in his native place. The
village being really a township with a scattered population--except on
the Thorley estate, which was practically part of a great New England
city, where there were rows of suburban streets--it was quite
insufficiently served by Dr. Noonan at one end and Dr. Hill at the
other, for Uncle Sim in the Old Village could scarcely be said to count.
No; the opening was good enough. The trouble lay, apparently, in Thorley
Masterman himself. Making all allowances for the fact that a young
physician must wait patiently, and win his position by degrees, he had
reason to feel chagrined. He grew ashamed to pass the little house in
the Old Village which he had fitted up as an office. He grew ashamed to
go out in his runabout.

The runabout had been worse than an extravagance, since, on the ground
that it would take him to his patients the more quickly, he had felt
justified in borrowing its price. The most useful purpose it served now
was to bring Mr. Willoughby home from town when unfit to come by
himself. Otherwise its owner hated taking it out of the garage,
especially if Claude were in sight. Claude had envied him the runabout
at first, but soon found a way to work his feeling off.

"Anybody dying, old chap?" he would ask, with a curl of his handsome
lip. "Hope you'll get to him in time."

It was while in the runabout, however, in the early part of a November
afternoon, that the young doctor met his uncle Sim.

"Hello, Thor!" the latter called. "Where you off to? Was looking for
you."

Thor brought the machine to a standstill. Uncle Sim threw a long, thin
leg over his mare's back and was on the ground. "Whoa, Delia, whoa! Good
old girl!"

He liked to believe that the tall bay was spirited. Standing beside
Thor's runabout, he held the reins loosely in his left hand, while the
right arm was thrown caressingly over Delia's neck. The outward and
visible sign of his eccentricity was in his difference from every one
else. In a community--one might say a country--in which each man did his
utmost to look like every other man, the fact that Simeon Masterman was
willing to look like no one but himself was sufficient to prove him, in
the language of his neighbors, "a little off." It was sometimes said
that he suggested Don Quixote--he was so tall, so gaunt, and