d the letter through, without allowing his expression to
change. Then he started to reread it, stopped, and suddenly crumpled it
up in his big fist. A low curse escaped his lips. It was heard by a
passing nurse, who hurried to him with the question, "Did you call,
doctor? Are you in pain?"

"No. Let me alone," was his harsh answer, and the patient girl moved
away, with a little shake of her head. The great physician had not been
his cheerful, kindly self for some time. Perhaps she surmised, too, that
the mail which she had laid in his lap had not been all that he had
anticipated.

With scarcely a move, he sat, staring in front of him, until the evening
shadows had turned the landscape to a dull monotone. Then he slowly
arose, and, with his mind so completely bent upon one subject that his
body was a thing apart and its weakness forgotten, stepped out into the
darkening city.

Time had ceased to exist for him, as he walked the almost deserted
streets of Toul like a flesh-and-blood automaton. But the physical
exercise brought a quota of mental relief at last, and the cool night
air soothed his first burning pain and anger with its unconscious balm.
At length he was able to face the truth frankly, and then he suddenly
knew that all the time it was not his heart, so much as his pride, which
had been hurt.

An hour earlier he would not have admitted a single doubt of his real
love for Marion Treville. Now he could not but admit that the initial
stab of bitterness was being healed by a real, though inexplicable,
sense of relief. He could even say that she had been right. His
affection for her had, indeed, been merely the outgrowth of life-long
intimacy. It was never the mating call of heart to heart; he had never
felt for her the overwhelming passion of a lover for the woman in whom,
for him, all earthly things are bound up.

His walk became slower; he stopped. The deep blue-black sky had, of a
sudden, become the background for a softly glowing mind picture, and
there seemed to appear before him the glorious misty eyes, and
bewitchingly curved lips of ... Smiles.

Her memory swept over him like a vision, and, even while he felt like a
traitor to self, came the wonderful realization that in his home city,
toward which his thoughts had so lately been bent, still lived the girl
whom he had loved--and had held apart within a locked and closely
guarded chamber of his heart--for years. It was as though scales, placed
before