e is paying a bitter
debt for youthful and ignorant folly. I believed this impossible, but so
it is. I am thankful to say, however, that he has every reason to hope
that the future, after this, is secure. I have chosen you to care for
him, because I know your ability; have heard of your powers of reticence
and cheerfulness. I depend upon you absolutely."

"Thank you, Doctor Hapgood."

Priscilla's face had gone deadly white, but never having heard Huntter's
name before, she was impersonal in her feeling.

"I will do my best."

The days following were days of strain and torture to Priscilla. Her
patient was a man who appealed to her strongly, pathetically. There were
hours when his gloom and depression would almost drag her along to the
depths into which he sank; then again he would beg her to pardon him for
his brutal thoughtlessness.

"Sit there, Miss Glynn," he said one day. "The sunshine is rather
niggardly, but when it rests on your hair--it lasts longer."

"Oh, my poor hair!"

"Poor? It looks like a gold mine." Then: "I wish you would read to me.
No; nothing recent or superficial. Something from the old, cast-iron
writers who knew how to use thumb screws and rack. There's something
wholesome in them; something you buck up against. They make you writhe
and groan, but they leave you with the thought that--you've lived through
something."

Again, another day, after a bad night:

"I think you'd better go into the next room, Miss Glynn, and take a nap.
I'd feel less brutally selfish if I could see your eyes calmer. Besides,
being shut away here from all I'm dying to have makes an idiot of me. If
you stay any longer, looking at me with those queer eyes of yours, I may
break down and tell you all about it, just for the dangerous joy of
easing my own soul by dumping a load on yours. Good God! Miss Glynn,
such women as you should not be nurses; it isn't fair. I'd give--let me
see--well, I'd give six months of my life--since Hapgood says I stand a
fair chance for ninety years--to talk to you, man to woman, and get your
point of view--about something. There are moments, after a bad night,
when I think you women haven't had all they say you should have had. We
men have been too blindly sure we could play your game as well as our
own. Run now! If you stay another minute I'll regret it, and so will
you."

"Shall I shake your pillow before I go, Mr. Huntter?"

"Yes. Thank you. You manage to shake more whim-whams out