Lady Okehampton waited for no permission, but marched into her niece's room one dark September afternoon with the fashionable nerve specialist at her heels, the bland elderly physician from Cavendish Square, whom nobody in Mayfair had even heard of till he had entered upon his seventh decade, and who had languished at the wrong end of Harley Street for a quarter of a century, before the great world had made the remarkable discovery that he was the one man in London who could cure one of everything. He was kind and sensible, and really clever; but the great world loved him most because he had all the new names for old diseases at the tip of his tongue, and had the delightful manner which implied that the patient to whom he was talking was the one patient whose life he considered worth saving. "He really does think about you when he's feeling your pulse," said a dowager. "He ain't totting up last night's winnings at bridge all the time. He does really think, don't you know." Dr. Selwyn Tower, as he held Vera's wasted wrist in his broad, soft hand, looked as serious as if the fate of a nation were at stake. Indeed, he had been told that millions were in jeopardy, and in the modern mind the destinies of big fortunes are as serious as the rise and fall of peoples. The physician asked no troublesome questions; but he contrived to keep Vera in conversation--on indifferent subjects--for about a quarter of an hour, her aunt joining in occasionally with sympathetic nothings; and by the end of that time he had made up his mind about the case, or at least about his immediate treatment of the case. He might have thoughts that went deeper and farther--but those could be held in abeyance. The thing to be done was to save this fragile form, which was obviously perishing. A rest cure--nothing else would be of any use--an uncompromising rest cure. Six weeks of solitary confinement in the care of a resident doctor and a couple of highly trained nurses. Lady Okehampton anticipated a struggle, remembering how resolutely Vera had resisted this line of treatment three months before; but her niece surprised her by offering no vehement opposition. "There is absolutely nothing the matter with me," she said, "but if it will please you, Aunt Mildred, I will do as Dr. Tower advises." "Nothing the matter! And you neither eat nor sleep! Is that nothing?" "Who told you that I can't sleep?" "My dear lady, your eyes tell us only too plainly. Insomnia has unmistakable symptoms," said the doctor. "Yes, it is true," Vera answered wearily. "I seem to have lost the faculty of sleep. It is a habit one soon loses. I lie staring at the daylight, and wondering what it is like to lose count of time." And then, after a little more doctor's talk, soothing, and rather meaningless, she asked abruptly: "What time of year is it?" "Dear child," exclaimed Lady Okehampton, "can you ask?"