CHAPTER I


"How is he now, doctor? Don't--don't tell me there is no hope!"

The wife, a tall, aristocratic looking woman who, despite her advanced
years, her snow-white hair, her eyes now red and swollen from weeping,
and pallid face seamed with careworn lines from constant vigils, still
showed traces of former beauty, scanned the physician fearfully,
trying to read in the expression of his countenance what the friend
and man of science, out of sheer compassion, was doing his utmost to
conceal. He had just emerged from the sick chamber; the trained nurse,
methodical and quick, and singularly attractive looking in her neat
uniform, had closed the door noiselessly behind him. Two young girls,
one about eighteen and the other some four years her junior, both
possessing more than average good looks, stood timidly in the
background anxiously awaiting, together with their grief-stricken
mother, to hear the dreaded verdict.

The physician paid no attention to them, but paced up and down the
room, his manner stern and forbidding, his head inclined in deep
thought, as if bent under the weight of tremendous responsibilities. A
noted specialist in pulmonary troubles, Dr. Wilston Everett was well
past middle age, and his tall, erect figure, massive frame and fine,
leonine head, crowned by a mass of stubborn, iron-gray hair, made him