The Doctor spent the whole of the next day near the spot where he had met
the boy, fearing lest the lad might come again and not find him. He even
went a mile or so up the little creek half expecting to meet his young
friend, wondering at himself the while, that he could not break the spell
the lad had cast over him. Who was he? He had told the Doctor his name,
but that did not satisfy. Nor, indeed, did the question itself ask what
the old man really wished to know. The words persistently shaped
themselves--_What_ is he? To this the physician's brain made answer
clearly enough--a boy, a backwoods boy, with unusual beauty and strength
of body, and uncommon fineness of mind; yet with all this, a boy.

But that something that sits in judgment upon the findings of our brain,
and, in lofty disregard of us, accepts or rejects our most profound
conclusions, refused this answer. It was too superficial. It was not, in
short, an answer. It did not in any way explain the strange power that
this lad had exerted over the Doctor.

"Me," he said to himself, "a hard old man calloused by years of
professional contact with mankind and consequent knowledge of their
general cussedness! Huh! I have helped too many hundreds of children
into this world, and have carried too many of them through the measles,
whooping-cough, chicken-pox and the like to be so moved by a mere boy."

The Thompsons could have told him about the lad and his people, but the
Doctor instinctively shrank from asking them. He felt that he did not
care to be told about the boy--that in truth no one could tell him about
the boy, because he already knew the lad as well as he knew himself.
Indeed the feeling that he already knew the boy was what troubled the
Doctor; more, that he had always lived with him; but that he had never