get along without it. You can't fight and do
office work, so I'm going to make the most of my chance during this
fortnight's vacation--if you'll give me leave. If you won't--I think
I'll knock you down and get you where I want you that way."

He smiled--a smile with so much spirit and affection in it that
Chester's eyes filled, to his own astonishment, for up to this point he
had been both hurt and angry. After a moment he said, with his eyes on
the floor, but in a different tone from any he had yet used: "Go ahead,
Red. I'll try to prove I have some stuff in me yet."

"Of course you have." Burns's hand was on his friend's shoulder. "That's
what I'm counting on. Prove it by following directions to the letter.
And begin by coming with me for a trip into the country. I have to see a
case before I go to bed, and the air will do your head good."

It was the first of many similar trips. Arthur Chester may fairly have
been said to spend the succeeding fortnight in the company of the Green
Imp and its driver. From morning till night, and often in the night
itself when he found it impossible to sleep, he was living in the open
air by means of this device. Of walking, also, he did an increasing
amount as his strength grew under the regimen Burns insisted upon. But
for the first week, in spite of all the help his physician could give
him, he found himself indeed involved in a fierce struggle--a struggle
with shaken and unmanageable nerves; with a desperate craving for the
soothing, uplifting effect of the drug to which he was forced to admit
he had become perilously accustomed; with a black depression of spirit
which was worse than anything else he had to combat.

It was at the worst of one of these periods of darkness that, alone with
his patient upon a hilltop where the two had climbed, leaving the
Green Imp at a point where the road had become impossible, Burns said
suddenly:

"Ches, I believe, with all my care to give you the treatment I thought
you needed, I've failed to point out the most potent remedy of all."

Chester shook his head. "You've done everything, Red. All the trouble's
with me. I'm so pitiably weak--so much weaker than I ever dreamed I
could be. I can't seem to care whether I get out of this or not. All I
want is to lie down and go to sleep--and never wake up."

The last words came under his breath, but Burns heard them. He showed no
sign of being startled, though this mood was a gloomier one than he ha