o be kept here for a short time anyway,
considering the weather, and everything."

"Why, of course," said Von Rosen.

After the doctor had gone, he went out in the kitchen. He had had no
dinner. Jane Riggs, who had very acute hearing, came to the head of
the stairs, and spoke in a muffled tone, muffled as Von Rosen knew
because of the presence of death and life in the house. "The roast is
in the oven, Mr. von Rosen," said she, "I certainly hope it isn't too
dry, and the soup is in the kettle, and the vegetables are all ready
to dish up. Everything is ready except the coffee."

"You know I can make that," called Von Rosen in alarm. "Don't think
of coming down."

Von Rosen could make very good coffee. It was an accomplishment of
his college days. He made some now. He felt the need of it. Then he
handily served the very excellent dinner, and sat down at his
solitary dining table. As he ate his soup, he glanced across the
table, and a blush like that of a girl overspread his dark face. He
had a vision of a high chair, and a child installed therein with the
customary bib and spoon. It was a singular circumstance, but
everything in life moves in sequences, and that poor Syrian child
upstairs, in her dire extremity, was furnishing a sequence in the
young man's life, before she went out of it. Her stimulation of his
sympathy and imagination was to change the whole course of his
existence.

Meanwhile, Doctor Sturtevant was having a rather strenuous argument
with his wife, who for once stood against him. She had her
not-to-be-silenced personal note. She had a horror of the alien and
unusual. All her life she had walked her chalk-line, and anything
outside savoured of the mysterious, and terrible. She was
Anglo-Saxon. She was what her ancestresses had been for generations.
The strain was unchanged, and had become so tense and narrow that it
was almost fathomless. Mrs. Sturtevant, good and benevolent on her
chalk-line, was involuntarily a bigot. She looked at Chinese laundry
men, poor little yellow figures, shuffling about with bags of soiled
linen, with thrills of recoil. She would not have acknowledged it to
herself, for she came of a race which favoured abolition, but nothing
could have induced her to have a coloured girl in her kitchen. Her
imaginations and prejudices were stained as white as her skin. There
was a lone man living on the outskirts of Fairbridge, in a little
shack built by himself in the woods, who was sai