necessary yet," advised
Chester, his hands in his pockets. "Want me to sit up with you till you
work it all off?"

"It's beginning to look as if it wouldn't work off," muttered R. P.
Burns.

"Must be a worse attack than usual. How long have you been at it?"

"Don't know."

"Sawed that whole heap at the side there?"

"Suppose so."

"Lost a patient?"

"No."

"Blow out a tire?"

"No."

"Bad news of any sort?"

"No. Go to bed."

"I feel I oughtn't to leave you," persisted Chester. "Don't you think it
might ease your mind to tell me about it?"

Burns came at him with the saw, and Chester fled. Burns went back to
his woodpile, marshalled the sawed sticks into orderly ranks, then stood
still once more and once more looked up at the stars.

"If an hour of that on a night like this won't take the nonsense out of
me," he solemnly explained to a bright particular planet now low in the
heavens, "I must be past help. But I'll be--drawn and quartered if I'll
give in. Haven't I had knockouts enough to be able to keep my head this
time? Red Pepper Burns, 'Remember the Maine' Now, go to bed yourself!"

CHAPTER VIII. IN WHICH HE IS UNREASONABLY PREOCCUPIED

"Red Pepper Burns, put down that stuff and come over. It's nine o'clock,
and Pauline goes tomorrow, as you very well know. And not only Paul, but
Mrs. Lessing. Paul's persuaded her to start when she does, though she
wasn't expecting to go for three days longer."

R. P. Burns looked up abstractedly. "Can't come now. I'm busy," he
replied, and immediately became reabsorbed in the big book he was
studying.

Chester gazed at him amazedly. He sat at the desk in the inner office,
surrounded by books, medical magazines, foreign reviews in both French
and German, as Chester discovered on approaching more closely, by loose
anatomical plates, by sheets of paper covered with rough sketches of
something it looked more like a snake in convulsions than anything else.
Evidently Burns was deep in some sort of professional research.

It was not that the sight was an unaccustomed one. There could be no
question that R. P. Burns, M.D., was a close student; this was not the
first nor the fortieth time that his friend had thus discovered him.
The view to be had from the point where Chester stood, of the small
laboratory opening from this office, was also a familiar one. He could
see steam arising from the sterilizer: he knew surgical instruments were
boiling merrily away