singular personal appeal to Josephine's nature. From the time that
he turned his head towards her voice on that fateful night, his eyes had
always followed her around the room with a wondering, yearning, canine
half-intelligence. Without being able to convince herself that he
understood her better than his regular attendant furnished by the
doctor, she could not fail to see that he obeyed her implicitly, and
that whenever any difficulty arose between him and his nurse she was
always appealed to. Her pride in this proof of her practical sovereignty
WAS flattered; and when Doctor Duchesne finally admitted that although
the patient was now physically able to be removed to the hospital, yet
he would lose in the change that very strong factor which Josephine had
become in his mental recovery, the young girl as frankly suggested that
he should stay as long as there was any hope of restoring his reason.
Doctor Duchesne was delighted. With all his enthusiasm for science, he
had a professional distrust of some of its disciples, and perhaps was
not sorry to keep this most interesting case in his own hands. To
him her suggestion was only a womanly kindness, tempered with womanly
curiosity. But the astonishment and stupefaction of her parents at this
evident corroboration of suspicions they had as yet only half believed
was tinged with superstitious dread. Had she fallen in love with this
helpless stranger? or, more awful to contemplate, was he really no
stranger, but a surreptitious lover thus strategically brought under her
roof? For once they refrained from open criticism. The very magnitude of
their suspicions left them dumb.

It was thus that the virgin Chatelaine of Burnt Ridge Ranch was left to
gaze untrammeled upon her pale and handsome guest, whose silken,
bearded lips and sad, childlike eyes might have suggested a more Exalted
Sufferer in their absence of any suggestion of a grosser material
manhood. But even this imaginative appeal did not enter into her
feelings. She felt for her good-looking, helpless patient a profound
and honest pity. I do not know whether she had ever heard that "pity was
akin to love." She would probably have resented that utterly untenable
and atrocious commonplace. There was no suggestion, real or illusive,
of any previous masterful quality in the man which might have made his
present dependent condition picturesque by contrast. He had come to her
handicapped by an unromantic accident and a pract