ittle seed in the soil so plainly harrowed for its growth. Mr.
Opdyke," and now the roses trembled with her earnestness; "do you
realize at all the meaning of the word _disease_?"

Reed yielded to a wayward impulse left over from his boyhood.

"It generally is supposed to be connected rather intimately with germs,
Mrs. Brenton," he assured her.

"By no means. And so you really do cling to the old, old fallacies? It
seems too bad, and for such a man as you are. Most of us, you know,
have cast them over. We now are quite convinced that disease is but
another name for sin and unbelief; that the universal cure lies in the
submission of one's will to the dictates of the Universal Mind."

"Really? How interesting!" Opdyke's courteous voice lacked none of the
symptoms of complete conviction.

Katharine leaned a little nearer.

"Mr. Opdyke, little as you may believe it, physical disease has no real
existence."

"Indeed?" Reed queried politely, quite as if the question had no
personal significance for him.

"Not at all. It only shows the inherent weakness of the one who
believes himself an invalid."

This time, Reed felt himself suddenly turning balky.

"Oh, I say!" he protested.

Katharine laid a steadying hand upon the couch, and Opdyke eyed the
steadying hand much as if it had been a toad.

"Mr. Opdyke, even in so sad a case as yours, the remedy is quite within
your hands," she told him gravely.

Reed's sense of humour came back again to his relief.

"How do you make that out?" he asked her, taking his eyes from the
potential hopping toad to rest them on the face before him, a face
serenely smug with the consciousness of its own sanctification.

"If you would only trust and believe, would throw your whole nature
into tune with spiritual law and order, you could get up off from that
couch, tomorrow, and walk down to the post office and back again."

Reed lost the great essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the
finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it,
since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he
smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to the
central fact.

"It only rests with you how long you are to lie here, Mr. Opdyke,"
Katharine was reiterating solemnly, yet with the same carefully
manufactured smile that had appeared upon her lips simultaneously with
the first expressions of her creed.

Reed experienced a sudden wave of phys