with any superfluous advice,
I should say that you had been a nurse--you seem to have the instinct.
You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss."

"Why should I?" she asked, "with a doctor at hand? I was thinking all
the time how you lean on a doctor. I should never have known what to
do. How is she? What was the matter?"

"She's resting. It isn't every elderly lady who can get a compartment
from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at
Albany by one set of grandchildren and she's to be taken off at
Boston by another set. And she's old and her heart's a little
sluggish--self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the
generations, I observe--though I'm a young physician at that!"

Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into
confusion.

"I don't know your name, I think--mine is Annette Markham."

Dr. Blake drew out a card.

"Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of
Occupation," he supplemented, "now looking for a practice in these
United States!"

"The Philippines--oh, you've been in the East? When we were in the
Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly--I didn't think we'd all
be talking of them so soon--"

"Oh, you've been in the Orient--do you know the China Coast--and Nikko
and--"

"No, only India."

"I've never been there--and I've heard it's the kernel of the East," he
said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding
a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern
nor Western, Yankee nor Southern--nor yet quite British. It was rather
cosmopolitan--he had dimly placed her as a Californienne. Perhaps this
fragment explained it. She must be a daughter of the English official
class, reared in America. The theory would explain her complexion and
her simple, natural balance between frankness and reserve. He formed
that conclusion, but, "How do you like America after India?" was all he
said.

"How do you like it after the Philippines?" she responded.

"That is a Yankee trick--answering one question with another," he said,
still following his line of conjecture; "it was invented by the
original Yankee philosopher, a person named Socrates. I like it after
everything--I'm an American. I'm one of those rare birds in the Eastern
United States, a native of New York City."

"Well, then,"--her manner had, for the first time, the brightness which
goes with youth, plus the romantic adventure--"