"Perish the thought!" returned Linda devoutly. "I wouldn't have you within a thousand miles of father." "That's what the doctor says," remarked King, his pensive gaze bent on the ribbon bordering of Linda's thin frock. She started and leaned toward him. "The doctor!" she repeated. "Has Doctor Flagg been talking to you about father? Is he--is he worried about him?" King shook his head. "I didn't go to Doctor Flagg. I went to Doctor Young. We've been getting some golf together lately, and he's a good sort." "What's the matter with _you_, Bertram?" Linda sat up again, and her voice and manner cooled. "What do you want of a doctor?" King shook his head. "Never in my life before: first offense. Everything seemed to go back on me all of a sudden. Sleeping, eating, and all the rest of it." The speaker scowled. "The mischief of it is, Young says I've got to get away for a month at least. He says--Oh, you don't care what he says." Linda regarded the downcast one. He was speaking to her as to an equal, not, as usual, with tacit rebuke for some misdemeanor. This blunt reproach, if it were reproach, merely referred casually to her indifference. "I care a great deal," she returned, with spirit. "I'm sure it will make my father very anxious to have you away at the same time he is." King lifted his weary eyes to hers, eager and bright. "I'm sure Doctor Flagg could give you a tonic or something to tide you over till we return in September," she went on. "You could go then." Her companion leaned back in his chair with a long, inaudible breath. "We have arranged all that. Mr. Barry wants me to go." The speaker did look rather cadaverous. Linda realized it now. It was a strange thing to have in any degree a sense of compassion for him: this masterful man on whom her father leaned, the man who alone in all the world had a hundred times without a word put her in the wrong, and whom as often she had fervently wished she might never see again. She had chafed against that chain of her father's reliance which bound herself as well. There was no escaping King, and when in her busy college life she thought of him at all, it was as a presumptuous creature who was continually making good his presumption; and what could be more exasperating than that? King was a self-made man, one with few connections in Chicago, one of whom was Linda's voice teacher, Mrs. Porter. The girl never had exactly understood this relationship, but the fact that some of Mrs. Porter's blood ran in his veins constituted Bertram's only redeeming trait in the eyes of that lady's adorer. Now as she regarded him, staring with discontented eyes at the rug, a sense came over her for the first time that King was a lonely figure. It was all very well for a man in health to live at the University Club and have his mind and life entirely wrapped up in business; but when eating and sleeping became difficult and the brain was over-weary, the evenings might seem rather long to him.