"O Richling, that's silly!" "I--I know it," exclaimed the other, quickly; "I see it is. If he could spare me, of course he wouldn't be paying me a salary." But the Doctor silenced him by a gesture. "The question is not whether he can spare you, at all. It's simply, can you spare him?" "Without violating any pledge, you mean," added Richling. "Of course," assented the physician. "Well, I can't spare him, Doctor. He has given me a hold on life, and no one chance in seven, or six, or five is going to shake me loose. Why, I tell you I couldn't look Mary in the face!" "Have your own way," responded the Doctor. "There are some things in your favor. You frail fellows often pull through easier than the big, full-blooded ones." "Oh, it's Mary's way too, I feel certain!" retorted Richling, gayly, "and I venture to say"--he coughed and smiled again--"it's yours." "I didn't say it wasn't," replied the unsmiling Doctor, reaching for a pen and writing a prescription. "Here; get that and take it according to direction. It's for that cold." "If I should take the fever," said Richling, coming out of a revery, "Mary will want to come to me." "Well, she mustn't come a step!" exclaimed the Doctor. "You'll forbid it, will you not, Doctor? Pledge me!" "I do better, sir; I pledge myself." So the July suns rose up and moved across the beautiful blue sky; the moon went through all her majestic changes; on thirty-one successive midnights the Star Bakery sent abroad its grateful odors of bread, and as the last night passed into the first twinkling hour of morning the month chronicled one hundred and thirty-one deaths from yellow fever. The city shuddered because it knew, and because it did not know, what was in store. People began to fly by hundreds, and then by thousands. Many were overtaken and stricken down as they fled. Still men plied their vocations, children played in the streets, and the days came and went, fair, blue tremulous with sunshine, or cool and gray and sweet with summer rain. How strange it was for nature to be so beautiful and so unmoved! By and by one could not look down a street, on this hand or on that, but he saw a funeral. Doctors' gigs began to be hailed on the streets and to refuse to stop, and houses were pointed out that had just become the scenes of strange and harrowing episodes. "Do you see that bakery,--the 'Star Bakery'? Five funerals from that place--and another goes this afternoon."