nch, and was
everywhere at once doing everything, clicking his cane, whistling gently
or humming a low, crooning tune, smiling for the most part, keeping his
own counsel and exhibiting no more in his face of what was in his heart
than the pink and dimpled back of a six-months' baby.

To say that the Doctor was everywhere in Harvey is inexact. He was
everywhere except on Quality Hill in Elm Street. There, from the big,
bulging house with its towers and minarets and bow windows and lean-tos,
ells and additions, the Doctor was barred. There was chaos, and the
spirit that breathed on the face of the waters was the Harvey
representative of the Maryland Satterthwaites, with her crimping pins
bristling like miniature gun barrels, and with the look of command upon
her face, giving orders in a firm, cool voice and then executing the
orders herself before any one else could turn around. She could call the
spirits from the vasty deep of the front hall or the back porch and they
came, or she knew the reason why. With an imperial wave of her hand she
sent her daughter off to some social wilderness of monkeys with all the
female Satterthwaites and Van Dorns and Mrs. Senators and Miss Governors
and Misses Congressmen, and with the offices of Mrs. John Dexter, Mrs.
Herdicker, the ladies' hatter, and two Senegambian slaveys, Mrs. Nesbit
brought order out of what at one o'clock seemed without form and void.

It was late in the afternoon, almost evening, though the sun still was
high enough in the heavens to throw cloud shadows upon the hills across
the valley when the Doctor stabled his mare and came edging into the
house from the barn. He could hear the clamor of many voices; for the
Maryland Satterthwaites had come home from the afternoon's festivity. He
slipped into his office-study, and as it was stuffy there he opened the
side door that let out upon the veranda. He sat alone behind the vines,
not wishing to be a part of the milling in the rooms. His heart was
heavy. He blinked and sighed and looked across the valley, and crooned
his old-fashioned tune while he tried to remember all of the life of the
little girl who had come out of the mystery of birth into his life when
Elm Street was a pair of furrows on a barren, wind-swept prairie hill;
tried to remember how she had romped in girlhood under the wide sunshine
in the prairie grass, how her little playhouse had sat where the new
dining-room now stood, how her dolls used to litter t