John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was design in his devotion to the new prescription of which the doctor knew nothing. On the fifth day of his confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming every afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with their uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd contortions in the depths of his room: twisting his wrists; standing on one foot like a stork and twirling his great heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric imitation of a ballet dancer; then creeping to and fro across the room in a silly series of bowings and scrapings and salutings that threw Dick into irrepressible laughter. Caught shamefacedly in the very midst of these absurdities, John confessed to the two of them what he would at the moment have confessed to no other living being—last of all to Bessie. "I am taking lessons," he said, "from an actor. He is going to make me easy and graceful, so people won’t call me awkward any more—nor homely," and he looked significantly at Tayna. "Oh," the children both gasped respectfully, and repeated with a kind of awe in their voices: "From an actor!" "Yes. Every evening the doctor lets me go for a walk. On every other one of these walks I go to the actor’s hotel, and he teaches me." "Awh! An actor-r-r!" breathed Dick again, his features depicting profoundness both of impression and speculation. "Say!" he proposed presently. "I would rather you would be an actor than a president, anyway." John laughed. "I am not going to be an actor," he said, "I am only going to be polished till I shine like a human diamond." And then he devoted himself to the entertainment of his callers. "Remember! Never again the typewriter!" the physician adjured sternly, when the fortnight of John’s captivity was done. For although conveying this verdict immediately to Mitchell, the doctor had postponed its announcement to his patient till his discharge from the hospital. John was stunned. The typewriter was his bread. At first he rebelled, but with a rush like the swirl of waters over his head, the memory of that night when he was blind for an hour came to him and humbled him. With the trembling courage of a coward, he opened the door of room 513; saw with sickening heart the strange face at his desk, shook the flabby hand of Heitmuller, and inwardly braced himself to enter for the last time between the double doors, where presently he confessed his plight as if it had been a crime. "You don’t imagine we would let you go, do you?" Mr. Mitchell asked, while an expression of amazement grew upon his face till it became a laugh. "Why, Jack"—Mr. Mitchell had never called him Jack before—"we should have to pay you a salary just to stick around and keep the rest of us straight."