maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day,
and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt
feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to 'phone for an ambulance.

In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the
capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident,
with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.

"Ambulance call to 49," he said briefly. "What's the trouble?"

"Oh, yes, doctor," sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there
should be trouble in the house was the greater. "I can't think what can
be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a
young woman, a Miss Elsie--yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never
before in my house--"

"What room?" cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker
was a stranger.

"The skylight room. It--"

Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of
skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker
followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.

On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in
his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue,
not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips
down from a nail. Ever afterward there remained crumples in her mind and
body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said
to her.

"Let that be," she would answer. "If I can get forgiveness for having
heard it I will be satisfied."

The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of
hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along
the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own
dead.

They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in
the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: "Drive
like h----l, Wilson," to the driver.

That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little
news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me)
to weld the incidents together.

It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who
had been removed from No. 49 East ---- street, suffering from debility
induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:

"Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,
says the patient will recover."

A SERVICE OF LOVE

When one loves o