He, too, on his dying bed called his son to him; and to this son he said
many things; and among these things was that it had ever been the dearest
wish of her that had gone as well as of him that was about to go that
their son should wed the daughter of the widow of Jimmy Blair.

And Jack Schuyler, sobbing by the side of the great, mahogany bed in the
great, dark room, even as he had sobbed beside the same bed in the same
room so short a time before, promised, as Tom Blake had promised, that
all that he might do to bring to wife the girl his parents desired for
him as wife, he would do; and not from any obeisance to filial reasons,
but because he wanted to--because he loved her--had always loved her.

It was good old Dr. DeLancey who repeated his offices in this case, as in
the other; and he repeated them in the same way, patting the broad,
throbbing young shoulders--reiterating with twitching lips, his "There,
there, boy! There, there, there!"--reiterating it uselessly--and knowing
that it was uselessly that he reiterated--and yet helpless in the vast
profundity of helplessness that was his.

And that same year did Dr. DeLancey lose yet another friend that was a
patient--a patient that was a friend. It was the violet-eyed widow of
Jimmy Blair. And all night long, from gray dusk until crimson dawn, Dr.
DeLancey had sat in the darkened parlor of the warm little house of red
brick; he had sat in a rocking chair, and on either old knee he had held
a sob-wracked, grief-torn, motherless girl, the one herself almost old
enough to be a mother. And again he had cried. Some doctors may lose
through oft-recurrence visualized their susceptibility to suffering; but
Dr. DeLancey was not of them. And when he stumbled on stiffened legs out
of the darkened parlor and into the incongruous mellow radiance of the
spring sunshine, his eyes were still wet, and he didn't care who knew it.