The Doctor shook his head at Brotherton and for two hours that was all Laura knew of the accident. Once when the Doctor stopped for a second to take a deep breath, Brotherton asked, "Do you want another doctor?" the little man shook his head again, and motioned with it at his daughter. "She's doing well enough." She kept her father's merciless pace, but always the sense of her stricken life seemed to be hovering in the back of her consciousness, and the hours seemed ages as she applied her bandages, and helped with the gruesome work of the knife on the charred stump of the arm. But finally it was over and she saw Brotherton and Hogan lift Grant to a cot, under her father's direction, and carry him to the bedroom she had used as a girl at home. While the Doctor and Laura had been working in his office Mrs. Nesbit had been making the bedroom ready. It was five o'clock, and the two fagged women were in Mrs. Nesbit's room. The younger woman was pale and haggard and unable to relax. The mother tried all of a mother's wiles to bring peace to the over-strung nerves. But the daughter paced the floor silently, or if she spoke it was to ask some trivial question about the household--about what arrangements were made for the injured man's food, about Lila, about Amos Adams and Kenyon. Finally, as she turned to leave the room, her mother asked, "Where are you going?" The daughter answered, "Why, I'm going home." "But Laura," the mother returned, "I believe your father is expecting your help here--to-night. I am sure he will need you." The daughter looked steadily, but rather vacantly at her mother for a moment, then replied: "Well, Lila and I must go now. I'll leave her there with the maid and I'll try to come back." Her hand was on the door-knob. "Well," hesitated her mother, "what about Tom--?" The eyes of the two women met. "Did father tell you?" asked the daughter's eyes. The mother's eyes said "Yes." Then rose the Spartan mother, and put a kind, firm hand upon the daughter's arm and asked: "But Laura, my dear, my dear, you are not going back again, to all--all that, are you?" "I am going home, mother," the daughter replied. "But your self-respect, child?" quoted the Spartan, and the daughter made answer simply: "I must go home, mother." When Laura Van Dorn entered her home she began the evening's routine, somewhat from habit, and yet many things she did she grimly forced herself to do. She waited dinner for her husband. She called his office vainly upon the telephone. She and Lila ate alone; often they had eaten alone before. And as the evening grew from twilight to dark, she put the child to bed, left one of the maids in the child's room, lighted an electric reading lamp in her husband's room, turned on the hall lamp, instructed the maid to tell the Judge that his wife was with her father helping him with a wounded man, and then she went out through the open, hospitable door.