down heavily, beside the table over which the roses lay
scattered, spilling their perfume in the room.

He fingered them lovingly, smoothing their velvety petals with a
tender hand, while his mind sought in vain to readjust itself to the
change the last two hours had brought.

He turned again to the fire, which glowed with blue and purple lights
behind the windows of isinglass, curling and flaming and twisting,
with fascinating brilliance. Long he sat, watching it, while the
sounds outside in the street grew less and less, and at last when he
went to the window, he found the street in darkness and in silence.
The moon had set, and his watch told him it was two o'clock.

The wind whimpered in the chimney like a lonesome puppy, rising and
falling, cying out and swelling with eerie rhythm; a soft spring wind,
he knew it was, that seemed to catch its breath like a thing in pain.

Looking again at the roses, he noticed that the leaves were drooping.
He hastily went into the dispensary and brought out two graduates
filled with water to put them in; but when he lifted them--he
saw, with poignant pain--they were gone past helping--they were
frost-bitten.

Then it was that he gathered them in his arms, with sudden passion,
and as he sat through the long night, he held them closely to him, for
kin of his they surely were--these frosted roses, on whose fragrant
young hearts the blight had so prematurely fallen!

CHAPTER IV

TANGLED THREADS

At daybreak, when the light from the eastern sky came in blue at the
window blind, and the gasoline lamp grew sickly and pale, the doctor
went to bed. He had thought it all out and outlined his course of
action.

He did not doubt the old doctor's word; his own knowledge gave
corroborative evidence that it was quite true, and he wondered he had
not thought of it. Still, there was something left for him to do. He
would play up and play the game, even if it were a losing fight. His
own house had fallen, but it would be his part now to see that the
minimum amount of pain would come to Pearl over it. She was young,
and had all the world before her--she would forget. He had a curious
shrinking from having her know that he had the disease, for like most
doctors, he loathed the thought of disease, and had often quoted
to his patients in urging them to obey the laws of physiological
righteousness, the words of Elbert Hubbard that "The time would come
when people would feel more disg