“Looks like brain trouble, sure,” the ambulance surgeon remarked, watching the stranger closely. “He can’t last long that way. Well, we’d better hustle him to the hospital as soon as we can.” They had the sick man on the stretcher before he had opened his eyes from his last attack. As they lifted him, he mumbled excitedly, and Brainard, listening close to his lips, thought he understood what was troubling him. “He wants that paper witnessed,” he explained. “I forgot—it’s something he dictated to me.” “Well, hurry up about it,” the surgeon replied carelessly, willing to humor the sick man. “Here!” Brainard dipped his pen in the ink-bottle and handed it to the surgeon, who lightly dashed down his signature at the bottom of the sheet, without reading it. “Now are we ready?” the doctor demanded impatiently. But the blue eyes arrested Brainard, and the young man, stooping over the stretcher, caught a faint whisper: “You’ll g-g-go?” “Sure!” “Gi-gi-give it all to—” Krutzmacht struggled hard to pronounce a name, but he could not utter the word. “It’s no use!” the doctor exclaimed. “Tell him to wait until he’s better.” But Brainard, moved by the sick man’s intense look of mental distress, raised his hand to the doctor and listened. At last the whispered syllable reached his ear: “M-M-Mel—” “I tell you it’s no use!” the ambulance doctor repeated irritably. “They’ll find out at the hospital what he wants done. Come on!” As they bore the stretcher through the narrow door, the agonized expression gave way, and the sick man articulated more distinctly: “Mel-Melo—” “Melo-melodrama!” Brainard said. “It’s all right, my friend. Don’t worry—I’ll fix it up for you!” With astonishing distinctness came back the one word: “Melody!” “All right—Melody!” The sick man would have said more, but the ambulance men bore him swiftly to the waiting vehicle and shoved him in. “Will you come along?” the doctor asked. “No. I’ll look in some time to-morrow, probably—St. Joseph’s, isn’t it?” The sick man’s eyes still rested on Brainard, when the latter poked his head into the dark ambulance. They seemed to glow with a full intelligence, and also with a command, as if they said: “Do just what I’ve told you to do!” “He knows what he wants, even if he can’t say it,” Brainard muttered to himself as the ambulance moved off. “Poor old boy!” III When Brainard opened the door of his room, he heard the rustle of papers on the floor, blown about by the draft from the window. He lighted his lamp and picked up the loose sheets, which were the typewritten leaves of his last play—the one that he had finally got back that very afternoon from a famous actor-manager, without even the usual note of polite regret from the secretary. The absence of that familiar note had dejected him especially.