"This is Dorinda," Rose Emily said; and he looked up and nodded as casually as if he had never seen her before, or had just parted from her. Which impression, Dorinda wondered, did he mean to convey? "I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a hammock?" he inquired. "What we need is to get her out on the porch. I've told her that every time I've seen her." "There are several hammocks in the store." As she answered his question, Dorinda glanced at him doubtfully. In the sickroom he appeared to have shed his youth as a snake sheds its skin. He might have been any age. He was brisk, firm, efficient, and as sexless as a machine. "Wouldn't it be safer to wait until the weather is milder?" Rose Emily asked, with an anxious smile. "Cold is so bad for me." "Nonsense!" He shook his head with a laugh. "That's the whole trouble with you. Your lungs are starving for air. If you'd kept out of doors instead of shutting the windows, you wouldn't be where you are now." At this his patient made a timid protest. "Your father always said----" He interrupted her brusquely. "My father was good in his generation, but he belongs to the old school." After this he talked on cheerfully, flattering her, chaffing her, while he made fun of her old-fashioned hygiene and asked innumerable questions, in a careless manner, about her diet, her medicine, her diversions, and the deformity of the baby, John Abner, who was born with a clubfoot. Though it seemed a long time to Dorinda, it was in fact not more than a quarter of an hour before he said good-bye and nodded to the girl to follow him out on the porch. "I'll show you the very place to hang that hammock," he remarked as he led the way out of doors. Rose Emily stretched out her thin arm to detain him. "Don't you think I'm getting better every day, Doctor?" "Better? Of course you're better." He looked down at her with a smile. "We'll have you up and out before summer." Then he opened the door, and Dorinda obediently followed him outside. "How on earth does she breathe in that oven?" he demanded moodily, while he walked to the far end of the porch. "She'll be dead in three months, if she doesn't get some fresh air into her lungs. And the children. It's as bad as murder to keep them in that room." He frowned slightly, and with his troubled frown, Dorinda felt that he receded from her and became a stranger. His face was graver, firmer, harassed by perplexity. It seemed to her incredible that he had looked at her that morning with the romantic pathos and the imperative needs of youth in his eyes. "Will she really be up by summer?" she asked, breathless with hope and surprise. "Up?" He lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively over his shoulder. "Why, she's dying. Don't you know she is dying?" "I thought so," her voice broke. "But you told her----" "You didn't expect me to tell her the truth, did you? What kind of brute do you take me for?"