Hilbrook? If you haven't had any breakfast to-day,
you must be hungry."

"Yes, I'm hungry," the old man assented, "but I don't want to eat
anything."

Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart
sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was
needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his
imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor's providential advent.
He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to
announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He
grasped the situation from the minister's brief statement, and confessed
that he had expected to find the old gentleman _dead_ in his bed some
day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up
the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer's
bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on
before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with
him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the
owner's interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but
impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of
Hilbrook's chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw
no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn
his head and look at her in speaking to her.

With the doctor's science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife's
service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help
being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his
medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he
saw no object in it.

The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his
will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in
living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy
he did not even ask to be let alone.

"You see," the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with
Ewbert apart, "he doesn't really need any medicine. There's nothing the
matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge
to his appetite. He's got cranky living here alone; but there _is_ such
a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in
danger of. If you're going to stay with him--he oughtn't to be left
alone"--

"I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper," said Ewbert, and he
fortified