you do yourself,
doctor, once your patients give you time to get away from the trail of
their beastly aches and pains."

The doctor eyed his companion with a sort of grim amusement.

"That last phrase sounds suspicious, Brenton," he remarked. "Are you
also--"

Brenton did not wait for him to finish out the question.

"No; I am not," he snapped, with a testiness that would have been a
healthy mental symptom, had it not betrayed the fact that his nerves
were dangerously on edge.

The doctor, still watching him from above his pipe, judged it would be
well to change the subject.

"Besides," he added casually; "I fancy that Reed may be an entering
factor."

"Reed?"

"Yes, with his father. The suspense is telling on them all, telling
badly on the professor. From the point of view of the family physician,
I believe it is any amount worse than accepting even a surety of the
worst."

"What do you call the worst?" Brenton asked flatly.

"That Reed would have to lie there on his back, till the remotest end
of time."

For an instant, the old light flared up in Brenton's eyes. Rising, with
a backward thrust of his chair that sent it crashing against a table,
he tramped the length of the room and back again.

"God help him!" he said, low. "You think that such a thing is
possible?"

The doctor nodded curtly. He loved Reed as he would have loved a son of
his own, and it hurt him to put into words even the possibility.

"It is in the limits of the possible," he answered.

Again the tramp across the floor and back again. Then Brenton burst out
fiercely.

"And I can sit here and whimper about my fate, that I am the square peg
in the round hole, while he--Doctor Keltridge, you don't mean it has
come to that?"

"Not yet. I only said, what we all must know, that it is on the cards.
No one can tell whether they will turn up, or down. Of course, the fact
that the rallying comes so slowly is bound to make us fear that the
injury was worse than we thought at first. On the other hand, it is
almost out of the question to judge it with any accuracy. Do what we
will, we can't get inside Reed's body, and see for ourselves just what
reactions, if any, are going on in there. I wonder, Brenton," the
doctor faced him steadily; "if ever it has occurred to you that, in the
last analysis, pure science is often baffled by the personal equation
which comes into it, which defies all analysis, and which upsets the
whole of our calculati