his master; he did not stir to move upwards where the dear hand lay, lest he jar the suffering man. Philos had a supercanine gentleness. It surpassed the tenderness of any woman whom Ferris had ever known.

However it might have been with Philos, the old doctor did not sleep at all. Instant and able, he gave to the patient the impression of omnipresent, if not omniscient mercy. He was not a great physician, but he was an honest one-he never assumed a case for which he was not equipped-and Ferris trusted him.. He felt grateful to the doctor, but perceived that he need not take the trouble to say so, as the two went down together into the depths of that unfathomable night. It seemed, like the small round pond, to be without a bottom.

Ferris did not ask the old doctor whether he were going to live. He was afraid he should.

He was still afraid to ask questions when the surgeon from Boston, and the surgeon from New York-the cousin of Tessa's, summoned at her wish-were brought to Routledge in his behalf. It was noon, and a warm one, and the window towards the cosmos was open from the top. The screen was removed for the winter. One crimson flower stretched into the room and regarded him with its golden eye while the surgeons were at work. When they had finished, the surgeon from New York shut the window and beheaded the cosmos. Ferris uttered an exclamation.

"What's the matter?" asked the surgeon from Boston.

"He has hurt it," explained the patient. "Hurt what?" demanded the surgeon from New York.

"Why, the flower."

Their

The surgeons exchanged glances. scientific eyes said, "He is still wandering." They went into another room to finish the consultation, but the old family doctor lingered long enough to pick up the guillotined cosmos and put it in the patient's hand; he knew pretty well how the professor felt about flowers; perhaps he took the trouble to think what "people of importance" these delicate friends were likely to become to this mangled life; this was the more kind in the country doctor because he was laboring under intense and quiet excitement; he did not consult with eminent men from New York or Boston often, and had never had the proud privilege of calling two to one case before. Then, it could

not be denied that he was attached to the patient.

Ferris lay still with the beheaded cosmos in his hand. Through the closed door the monotonous murmur of the surgeons' lowered voices reverberated like cannon in his ears. Trip ran thumping across the hall, and slammed two doors. Philos, outside, was barking at the horses with the bitterness of the gentle when aroused. Plainly, Philos attributed his master's misfortunes to the medical profession. Ferris smiled and fingeredalthough, being a flower-lover, he did not destroy-the petals of the crimson cosmos.

The

he repeated. The old doctor came back presently, and said good-by; he observed that a surgical nurse would be sent from the city. Ferris made no inquiries, and the old doctor took the Boston surgeon to the train. New York surgeon stayed to luncheon with Tessa. Tessa was charmingly dressed that morning in her house gown with the touch of orange-not too much-and looked ten years younger than she was. She came in kindly enough and asked Myrton if there were not something she could do, but she hurried back to her cousin. Ferris could hear their voices, but not their words; they were sitting upon the sofa in the hall before the fireplace. The hall opened through the centre of the large house; from it, at right angles, another passageway ran to the study; two doors intervened. Through these doors Tessa's soprano pierced; now and then she laughed. The two seemed to be having a good time. The injured man lay looking at the window where the green neck of the beheaded cosmos protruded. After a while the two in the hall stopped laughing, and Tessa, it seemed, stop-ped talking. Then Trip bumped, slamming in, and flung open all the doors he could find; shouting and calling his mother, he stamped back into the front hall, where he broke like a white squall. Tessa could be heard plainly, scolding the child-but prettily; she always scolded prettily before callers.

"Go right away, Tripsy, and be sure to shut the door."

Trip went away, but when had Trip ever been known to shut a door?

In shattered sentences the voice of the New

York surgeon came stabbing across the considerable space between the study and the hall. "No, I cannot give a positive prognosis." "But-" persisted Tessa; her question was inaudible.

form of physical activity that its hot heart could fancy, or its inventive head devise.

The disabled professor lay on his study couch and listened to the students tramping by; as they swung along they sang and shouted. The college seemed to have become all arms and legs and lungs. Muscle was

Tessa would coquet with Gabriel or Azrael. Ferris acknowledged as much to himself, but with more amusement than disturbance, in the definite pause before Dr. Pierpont said: "The fractures are the least of it. Those we can- The wounds are not serious-at least none but . . . the spine or brain. He will be disabled perhaps crippled for..."

There, Trip shut the door. To say that he banged it was a matter of course; the stout house, built on honor, shook to its oaken nerves and sinews. The wounded man received the shock as the house did, without an outery. He lay looking at the flower in his fingers.

Some one put it in water for him, that afternoon, since he seemed to wish it. The next morning it was the only one of its family left alive. The "golden and glorious" October had died suddenly in the night. A stinging frost had bitten the world.

The song with the inadequate close that the professor used to give his classes clicked through his brain:

was mere mind? What, indeed? It was but four weeks since the automobile shied, and he would have given his Chair to be one of those boys-the roughest, the rawest, yes, the most stupid-anything that could hold a bat or a brassie, anything that could run and leap and roar in the masculine autumn air.

Tessa used to come in and tell him about the games; she said she thought it would amuse him. After the surgical nurse arrived, Tessa continued to go to the games. Sheffield came, too, and sat by his professor and talked the patois of the links:

"You know, sir, you used to say our club had a tournament every fifteen minutes. There's another one on for to-morrow."

The professor was fond of Harry Sheffield. The lad was privileged, and ran in and out like a younger brother or an elder son about the house. Sheffield was not a scholar, only a clean, sunny, sporting lad. All his talk (it struck the sick man) was of things that could be done with hands and feet, with arms and legs and lungs. He seemed to have no Vocabulary but that of the campus and the links, the road and the field; he brought into the sick-room the sting of the happy weather, the wings of out-of-doors, the glories of muscular manhood, the ecstasies of paradise lost. The surgical nurse sent him away. She was a middle-aged woman, and had the insight of her experience; her cuffs were deep, and her cap was high; she wore spectacles with a line across the lens; the patient did not look at her when he could help it.

The study was twenty feet square; its alcove measured seven feet the narrow way, thus offering Ferris a map of existence covering twenty by twenty-seven feet. It had proved impossible or unsafe to move him; and then, as Tessa said, it would be so much easier to take care of him on the ground floor.

The alcove was protected by thin foldingdoors, painted white, as all the interior decoration of the house was; these doors, though

usually open, could be closed, if necessary, and one fold like the fly of a screen remained permanently fast at the foot of the bed-couch which the patient had retained by preference; it was a broad, modern affair, luxurious of its kind, than which nothing could be easier; he had some notion of his own about it which the nurse translated indulgently: "He likes to think that he is not quite sick abed."

Both the study and the alcove were alive with books; these climbed from floor to ceiling in deep white cases set into the thick walls. The professor's empty study-table stood just within range of his eyes.

Those travelled from a thick, green carpet to a cool, green papering, fortunately of a soft tint, undishonored by design. Tessa Tessa had put up a large portière as soon as it was decided that Myrton was to stay in the alcove; she regretted that the portière must be green (which was not Tessa's color), but distinctly felt that, as a background for her charming figure, it would hold more possibilities than white paint. There were two windows in the study, and in the alcove two; through one of these the dead cosmos looked in upon the disabled man; rather, one should say, it seemed to try to look, but could not, because it was dead. At the side of the couch was the inevitable small stand of the sick-room; across its petty dimensions, flowers, medicines, magazines, mail, and newspapers came and went as if they came or went not, before the indifferent eyes burning in the white face upon the pillow. Upon the floor in the corner Philos's basket stood against the white bookcase; the little dog had slept there every night.

"He will keep me awake crying wherever else you put him," Ferris had suggested. The astuteness of love prevailed, and Philos stayed beside his master; he made no more noise than a girl at a secret rendezvous; the spaniel moved stealthily, as if watched by unfriendly powers inclined to separate him from the beloved; he got in and out of his basket on padded tiptoe; when a thin hand hung down -sometimes it did hang down-from the edge of the bed, Philos crept up like a sigh and kissed it ecstatically.

There were some pictures in the study-not many, because books had dispossessed them, and the few which had crept in could not be seen from the couch; in the alcove there were none; the old paint was of bluish white, upon the folding-doors. Above the white surface

of the bed Tessa had thrown a company face of light Oriental silk, patterned in gold and green. Ferris did not like it; he thought it effeminate; but he did not protest; he seldom protested at anything Tessa did; when he particularly resented the silk counterpane, he pushed it off. It was beginning to occur to him that he could use his hands.

There, in that comfortable hell, the hurt man raved.

He raved, but it was without speech or language. The smoke of his torment went up silently. It did not take him long to find out that there is no common vocabulary between the sick and the well.

At first, with the naïveté of a man who had never been ill, he commented upon the tragic miracle-clearly, it could be no less-of which he was the victim. What black diviner had ordained that he, Myrton Ferris, should not be able to move? What natural law could have pinioned his proud physical personality? If he had been some anæmic, stooping professor, narrow-chested, faint-blooded, taking a decorous constitutional to the post-office, or a pious ride in the family carryall-but six feet two, and forty-four chest measure, the finest deltoid on his old college team, the champion of the links, the winner of a dozen cups, put away on closet shelves at Commencement time, lest they fail to reflect literary credit upon the Chair when the trustees came (but boyishly visited and cherished when nobody was looking)-he, the subject of this infernal sorcery, the plaything of a monstrous fate, smitten at one stroke, from man to mummy-he!

He began by maintaining that the thing was impossible. He said so to the college president in a quiet, polemical manner such as he would have used in arguing a difficult proposition before his classes. He said so often to the doctor and the nurse; he called their attention in the tone of an advocate to the nature and variety of his sufferings; he inclined to arraign them for these, as if his misfortune were their fault; he levied their sympathy as a matter of course; it occurred to him that they were paid to give it, and that he had a right to its expression. found in himself a tendency to stand upon this right. It was some time before the humorous side of it struck him. But one day it did,

He

The surgical nurse found his pillow wet. "What's this?" she asked; at the worst of a bad case she had never seen her patient weep. "I have been crying," the professor hastened to explain. "That is, I laughed until I cried. I couldn't help it. You must excuse me, Miss Binder. I am sure you will understand the the absurdity of my position. Its full force has, I believe, but this moment struck me."

The surgical Miss Binder did not understand in the least; her professional training had taught her not to understand, but to accept; therefore had she risen to her present pinnacles.

"A sick man," argued Ferris, "expects, he really expects people to care. He assumes that he is an object of interest to the ablebodied. He hands his physical miseries around, he offers his symptoms as if they were pink lemonade, or nuts and cider-something to entertain his friends with. He is the dispenser of an unconscious egoism-the host of his own agonies. He is subject to the most tremendous delusion outside of bedlam."

Miss Binder gazed through the line that the line that divided the lens of her spectacles; it was as if on one side of the line she could read the face of her distinguished patient, while on the other side she could not; the result was an optical obscuration, disturbing to a nurse with so high a cap and so deep a cuff.

"Sir?" said Miss Binder. "I am sure," she added, "that I have not found you a troublesome patient. There are plenty of them."

"Thank you, Miss Binder," said Ferris, more gently. He perceived that Miss Binder meant to pay him a compliment.

His barbaric impulse was to fling a pillow at her, and knock her glasses off, but a cripple is denied the luxuries of barbarism. He spent an hour wondering what would have happened if he had flung a pillow at Miss Binder. The hideous thing was that his mind was reduced to the infinite pettiness of the unoccupied. He had only Miss Binder to look at.

Tessa was greatly in demand by the students who were training for the great game before Thanksgiving. Tessa maintained that the sacred duty of a professor's wife was to interest herself in the students. Her husband had never combated this view of their professional relations to the college, nor had he seen any reason to do so. He had regarded her half-maternal, half-coquettish attitude to

wards the boys with the amused tolerance of a busy man for the caprice of a charming and idle woman.

If it occurred to him now that the surgical Miss Binder, considered as the sole solace of a desperate and desolate cripple, had her visible limitations, he did not complain. He seldom did complain to Tessa, or of her. He was used to expecting little of his wife, exacting nothing, and receiving what she chose to give.

Indeed, he felt that Tessa had, on the whole, been kind to him since the accident. He was sure that she had tried to do the proper thing, or even the wifely one; she looked after his meals conscientiously, and sat with him generally two hours when the nurse was off duty. As Tessa said, she must save her strength. Married happiness, like most things, is chiefly a matter of definitions. Ferris had long ago perceived that he and his wife defined the nature and domain of love by a different lexicography. But he did not love her the less for that.

At first, he had sometimes uttered even to her the occasional outcries of physical suffering which his inexperience of it wrung from him; and which, on the whole, it is natural to suppose that the closest relations of life may tolerate or even welcome. When he had said: "The pain is here," "The worst is there," "I have such and such distress," Tessa had returned a ladylike attention; she was never brutal. Once she had kissed him; he could remember but once. Then, one day he heard her telling Harry Sheffield on the piazza how greatly her husband's sickness wore upon her. "It depresses me," she pleaded.

The hurt man turned his face upon the pillow; he looked out of the window at the skeleton cosmos whose little brown bones were stark against the November sky; he did not tell Tessa how he felt the next time she came in to see him.

It is one of the overlooked conclusions of human experience that heaven requires two, but hell needs only one. After the day when the surgical Miss Binder found him laughing till he cried, Myrton Ferris retreated slowly into the reticence of his lot. That touch of irony had saved the last defence of the sickhis self-possession. This protecting power is as delicate as the electric communication with a submarine mine, but as formidable. Be