here, dressed in deep mourning, the tears standing in her eyes merely
because we were a little later than usual.

"Well," she hurried on as she dropped into a chair, "that is what they
are calling that big house of ours at Norwood--a cancer house, if there
is such a thing."

Clearly, Myra Moreton was a victim of nervous prostration. She had asked
the question with a hectic eagerness, yet had not waited for an answer.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "you do not, you cannot know what it means to have
something like this constantly hanging over you. Think of it--five of us
have died in less than five years. It haunts me. Who next. That is all I
can think about. Who next?"

Her first agitation had been succeeded by a calmness of despair, almost
of fatalism, which was worse for her than letting loose her pent-up
emotions.

I had heard of cases of people in whom there was no record of hereditary
predisposition to cancer, people apparently in perfect health, who had
moved into houses where cancer patients had lived and died and had
themselves developed the disease. Though I had, of course, never even
remotely experienced such a feeling as she described, I could well fancy
what it must be to her.

Kennedy watched her sympathetically. "But why do you come to me?" he
asked gently. "Don't you think a cancer specialist would be more likely
to help you?"

"A specialist?" she repeated with a peculiar hopelessness. "Professor
Kennedy, five years ago, when my Uncle Frank was attacked by cancer,
father was so foolish as to persuade him to consult a specialist whose
advertisement he saw in the papers, a Dr. Adam Loeb on Forty-second
Street here in New York. Specialist! Oh, I'm worried sick every time I
have a sore or anything like this on my neck or anywhere else."

She had worked herself from her unnatural calm almost into a state of
hysterics as she displayed a little sore on her delicate white throat.

"That?" reassured Kennedy. "Oh, that may be nothing but a little boil.
But this Dr. Loeb--he must be a quack. No doctor who advertises--"

"Perhaps," she interrupted. "That is what Dr. Goode out at Norwood tells
me. But father has faith in him, even has him at the house sometimes. I
cannot bear the sight of him. Since I first saw him my uncle, his wife,
another aunt, my cousin have died, and then, last week, my--my mother."

Her voice broke, but with a great effort she managed to get herself
together. "Now I--I fear that my father may