"Why," she asked brightly, "don't you go to New York yourself and
meet him?"

He answered instantly, almost sharply, "I can't do that." Then not liking
the way it sounded in his own ear, he gave her a reason. "If you knew the
number of babies that are coming along within the next month...."

"You need a rest," she said, "badly. I don't see how you live through
horrors like that. But there must be other people--somebody who can take
your work for you for a while. It can't make all that difference."

"It wouldn't," he admitted, "nine times out of ten. That call I got last
evening that broke up the dinner party,--an intern at the County
Hospital would have done just as well as I. There was nothing to it at
all. Oh, it was a sort of satisfaction to the husband's feelings, I
suppose, to pay me a thousand dollars and be satisfied that nobody in
town could have paid more and got anything better. But you see, you never
can tell. The case I was called in on at four o'clock this morning was
another thing altogether." A gleam had come into his eyes again as over
the memory of some brilliantly successful audacity. The gray old look had
gone out of his face.

"I don't altogether wonder that Pollard blew up," he added, "except that
a man in that profession has got no business to--ever."

The coffee urn offered Miss Wollaston her only means of escape but she
didn't avail herself of it. She let herself go on looking for a
breathless minute into her brother's face. Then she asked weakly,
"What was it?"