k any one--thank _Leerie_.

RUTH SAWYER.

[Illustration]

LEERIE

Chapter I

THE MAN WHO FEARED SLEEP

Peter Brooks felt himself for a man given up. He had felt his physical
unfitness for some time in the silent, condemning judgment masked under
the too sympathetic gaze of his fellow-men; he had felt it in the
over-solicitous inquiries after his health made by the staff; and there
was his chief, who had fallen into the comfortable week-end habit of
telling him he looked first-rate, and in the same breath begging him to
take the next week off. For months past he had been conscious of the
sidelong glances cast by his brother alumni at the College Club when he
appeared, and the way they had of dropping into a contradictory lot of
topics whenever he joined a group unexpectedly showed only too plainly
that he had been the real subject under discussion. Yes, he felt that the
world at large had turned its thumb down as far as he was concerned, but
it had caused him surprisingly little worry until that last visit to
Doctor Dempsy.

There it was as if Peter's sensibilities concerning himself had suddenly
become acute. The doctor sounded too reassuring even for a combined friend
and physician; he protested too much that he had found nothing at all the
matter with him--nothing at all. When a doctor seems so superlatively
anxious to set a man right with himself, it is time to look out; therefore
the casual, just-happened-to-mention-it way that he finally broached the
question of a sanitarium came within an inch of knocking the last prop
from under Peter's resolve not to lose his grip. For the first time he
fully realized how it felt to be given up, and, characteristically, he
thanked the Almighty that there was no one to whom it would really matter.

For a year he had been slowly going to pieces; for a year he had been
dropping in for Dempsy to patch him up. There had been a host of miserable
puny ailments which in themselves meant nothing, but combined and in a
young man meant a great deal. Of late his memory had failed him
outrageously; he had had frequent attacks of vertigo, and these of
themselves had rendered him unreliable and unfit for newspaper work.
Irresponsible! Unfit! Peter snorted the words out honestly to himself.
Under these conditions, and with no one to care, he could see no plausible
reason for trying to coax a mere existence out of life.

To those who knew him best--to Doctor Dempsy most