ed to meet him just beyond the hospital gate. Richling
waved his hand. He looked weak and tremulous. "Homeward bound," he said,
gayly.

The physician reached forward in his carriage and bade his driver stop.
"Well, be careful of yourself; I'm coming to see you in a day or two."

CHAPTER XXI.

THE SUN AT MIDNIGHT.

Dr. Sevier was daily overtasked. His campaigns against the evils of our
disordered flesh had even kept him from what his fellow-citizens thought
was only his share of attention to public affairs.

"Why," he cried to a committee that came soliciting his cooeperation,
"here's one little unprofessional call that I've been trying every day
for two weeks to make--and ought to have made--and must make; and I
haven't got a step toward it yet. Oh, no, gentlemen!" He waved their
request away.

He was very tired. The afternoon was growing late. He dismissed his
jaded horse toward home, walked down to Canal street, and took that
yellow Bayou-Road omnibus whose big blue star painted on its corpulent
side showed that quadroons, etc., were allowed a share of its
accommodation, and went rumbling and tumbling over the cobble-stones
of the French quarter.

By and by he got out, walked a little way southward in the hot, luminous
shade of low-roofed tenement cottages that closed their window-shutters
noiselessly, in sensitive-plant fashion, at his slow, meditative
approach, and slightly and as noiselessly reopened them behind him,
showing a pair of wary eyes within. Presently he recognized just ahead
of him, standing out on the sidewalk, the little house that had been
described to him by Mary.

In a door-way that opened upon two low wooden sidewalk steps stood Mrs.
Riley, clad in a crisp black and white calico, a heavy, fat babe poised
easily in one arm. The Doctor turned directly toward the narrow alley,
merely touching his hat to her as he pushed its small green door inward,
and disappeared, while she lifted her chin at the silent liberty and
dropped her eyelids.

Dr. Sevier went down the cramped, ill-paved passage very slowly and
softly. Regarding himself objectively, he would have said the deep shade
of his thoughts was due partly, at least, to his fatigue. But that would
hardly have accounted for a certain faint glow of indignation that came
into them. In truth, he began distinctly to resent this state of affairs
in the life of John and Mary Richling. An ill-defined anger beat about
in his brain in searc