The After House

by Mary Roberts Rinehart




CHAPTER I

I PLAN A VOYAGE


By the bequest of an elder brother, I was left enough money to see
me through a small college in Ohio, and to secure me four years in
a medical school in the East. Why I chose medicine I hardly know.
Possibly the career of a surgeon attracted the adventurous element
in me. Perhaps, coming of a family of doctors, I merely followed
the line of least resistance. It may be, indirectly but inevitably,
that I might be on the yacht Ella on that terrible night of August
12, more than a year ago.

I got through somehow. I played quarterback on the football team,
and made some money coaching. In summer I did whatever came to
hand, from chartering a sail-boat at a summer resort and taking
passengers, at so much a head, to checking up cucumbers in Indiana
for a Western pickle house.

I was practically alone. Commencement left me with a diploma, a
new dress-suit, an out-of-date medical library, a box of surgical
instruments of the same date as the books, and an incipient case