he Doctor's medical library, office,
reception room, and laboratory. Doors were arranged in metropolitan
fashion, so that patients might go out of the office without meeting
any one. The laboratory, at the back of the wing, was well fitted with
modern appliances for original research, and had, too, its own outside
door.

When Ralph came home, the other wing, at the left of the house, was to
be arranged in like manner for him if he so desired. Doctor Dexter had
some rough drawings under consideration, but wanted Ralph to order the
plans in accordance with his own ideas.

The breakfast bell rang again, and Doctor Dexter went downstairs. The
servant met him in the hall. "Breakfast is waiting, sir," she said.

"All right," returned the Doctor, absently. "I'll be there in a
moment."

He opened the door for a breath of fresh air, and immediately perceived
the small, purple velvet box at his feet. He picked it up,
wonderingly, and opened it.

Inside were the discoloured pearls on their bed of yellowed satin, and
the ivory-tinted slip of paper on which he had written, so long ago, in
his clear, boyish hand: "First, from the depths of the sea, and then
from the depths of my love."

Being unemotional, he experienced nothing at first, save natural
surprise. He stood there, staring into vacancy, idly fingering the
pearls. By some evil magic of the moment, the hour seemed set back a
full quarter of a century. As though it were yesterday, he saw Evelina
before him.

She had been a girl of extraordinary beauty and charm. He had
travelled far and seen many, but there had been none like Evelina. How
he had loved her, in those dead yesterdays, and how she had loved him!
The poignant sweetness of it came back, changed by some fatal alchemy
into bitterness.

Anthony Dexter had seen enough of the world to recognise cowardice when
he saw it, even in himself. His books had taught him that the mind
could hold but one thought at a time, and, persistently, he had
displaced the unpleasant ones which constantly strove for the right of
possession.

Hard work and new love and daily wearying of the body to the point of
exhaustion had banished those phantoms of earlier years, save in his
dreams. At night, the soul claims its own--its right to suffer for its
secret sins, its shirking, its betrayals.

It is not pleasant for a man to be branded, in his own consciousness, a
coward. Refusal to admit it by day does not change th