im short with, "You're not deceiving
yourself with any notion that she--"

The other answered quickly, with a smile of bitter humility: "You have
seen her look at me. She does not know whether I am a human being or
not--I am to her any strong animal, a horse, an ox--any force that can
carry Ariadne safely!" He added, in another tone, his infinitely gentle
tone: "I see in that the extremity of her anxiety."

The doctor put his hand on the other man's powerful arm. "Do you realize
what you are proposing to yourself? You are human. You are a young man.
Are you strong enough to keep to it?"

Rankin looked at him. Mrs. Sandworth leaned forward.

"I am," said Rankin finally.

The words echoed in a long silence.

The younger man stood up. "I am going to see a lawyer," he announced in
a quiet voice of return to an everyday level. "Until then, we have all
more to think over than to talk about, it seems to me."

* * * * *

After he had left them the brother and sister did not speak for a time.
Then the doctor said, irritably: "Julia, say something, for Heaven's
sake. What did you think of what he said?"

"I didn't hear what he said," answered Mrs. Sandworth; "I was looking at
him."

"Well?" urged her brother.

"He is a good man," she said.

A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent,
gazing expectantly at her.

"How awfully he's in love with her!" she brought out finally. "That's
the whole point. He's in love with her! All this talk about 'ways of
living' and theories and things that they make so much of--it just
amounts to nothing but that he's in love with her."

"Oh, you sentimental idiot!" cried the doctor. "I hoped to get some
sense out of you."

"That's sense," said Mrs. Sandworth.

"It hasn't anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in
love with--"

"He was _not_!" cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.

The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he
spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: "_I_ have loved her all her
life."

"Oh, you!" retorted his sister, with a sad conclusiveness.

Ariadne came running out to them. "I just went to look into Muvver's
room, and she was sound asleep! Honest! She was!"

The child had heard enough of the doctor's long futile struggles with
the horrors of Lydia's sleepless nights to divine that her news was
important. She was rewarded with a startled l