an unlighted cigar between his lips, gazing intently at nothing.

In the course of the next few hours he looked over an assortment of
ailing babies, soothed as many distracted mothers, ordered to a gay
watering-place one young girl whom he was obliged to treat for chronic
headache--chronic heartache not being professionally recognizable,--
administered the pathetically limited alleviations of his art to a
failing cancer-patient (she happened to be a rich woman, going with
the fortitude of the poor down the road to the great Darkness), and so,
looking in on various pneumonias and fevers, broken souls and bruised
bodies, by the way, brought up at last at the hospital to see how
yesterday's operation was going on. It was going on in so very mixed
a manner that he telephoned he should not return to lunch--prophesying
long after the event.

It was turning dusk when he started on his second round of visits
homeward, stopping on the outskirts to rebandage, in one of the
tenements, a child's broken arm. He had not returned his footman's
salutation that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all
day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that
inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past
three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich
patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment--the lack of anything
to do--had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do
anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia--the registered protest
of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out of the Doctor
than all his day's practice put together; he always came from it in a
misery of doubts.

The dusk was becoming the dark when he set his foot wearily on the