bone to pay ye. God bless ye, Doc!"

He looked down at the hard-wrung tears on his hand. "You have paid me
already," he said; and Kate knew that he meant it.

Afterwards she questioned him a little about the case.

"It was a gastro-enterostomy, without complications," he explained. "A
very simple thing, done every day."

He described the operation in some detail, Kate watching him in amaze.

"You can't tell me that a thing like that is done every day! Jacques, be
honest--isn't it a very remarkable operation for a country doctor to
perform?"

"Oh--for a country doctor, perhaps. For a surgeon who has had some
experience, no."

"You are a surgeon, then, not a doctor?"

He smiled, that warm, flashing smile which always fell like a gleam of
sunlight across her heart. "I am--whatever people need me to be."

It was true--physician, nurse, companion, guardian, friend--Jacques
Benoix was always whatever people needed him to be.

In that moment, Kate realized that he had given up a great career to
bring his sick wife into the country.

One of the closest bonds between them was a love for music. Kate's
singing, untrained and faulty though it was, gave keen pleasure to his
starved ears, and often he brought his little son to hear her; a boy of
ten, rather grave and shy, but with his father's beautiful smile.
Sometimes there were duets to be tried out together; Kildare, when he
was at home, listening tolerantly and beating time out of time to the
pleasant sounds they made.

But he was not often at home in those days. He sought his pleasure
elsewhere. The guest-house had been empty for months.

Kate and Benoix found his frequent absences rather a relief. They were
freer to discuss the things that did not interest him, to read aloud to
each other, to play games with the exacting Apple-Blossom, an executive
from her cradle. It was at last the sort of domestic life of which every
girl dreams in her secret heart; and Kate grew lovelier than her
loveliest.

Meanwhile the countryside watched, and whispered, and waited. The
countryside was wise in the ways of Nature, if these two were not.

Once Kildare asked (she missed the wistfulness of his voice), "Ain't it
time you were riding again, Kit, and playing cards with the boys? They
like to have you 'round. They're getting jealous of that kid of yours."

Kate smiled at him, absently. She was sitting on the floor, building a
house of blocks under instruction from young Jemi