With this the young mistress of Storm had much to do; and while this fact did not apparently lessen the neighborhood's attitude of critical animosity toward her, it gave the girl a keen pleasure to know that she was helping her friend. She began to understand the secret of the strong hold his profession has upon those who follow it truly--that warmly personal relation between the sufferer and his physician which is almost filial in its intensity. Jacques loved his patients, and they loved him. But it was not a lucrative practice. She was witness to one little scene that came often to her memory in after days. He had stopped to visit a young farm laborer whom he had recently relieved of a stomach-trouble that was literally starving him to death. An old woman had followed him to the door of the cabin, her work-worn hands twisting together, her lips too tremulous for speech. "But your troubles are over, Mrs. Higgs!" he smiled, lifting his hat with the punctilious courtesy he showed all women. "Live? Certainly he will live, and in a few weeks we shall have him walking about, eating you out of house and home." Still the old creature was unable to speak; but she seized the hand he held out to her, and carried it to her lips. When he withdrew it, in laughing embarrassment, there were tears upon it. At last her voice came, hoarsely: "I don' know what it's goin' to cost, an' I don't, keer! It's wuth every cent, an' I'll wuk my fingers to the bone to pay ye. God bless ye, Doc!" He looked down at the hard-wrung tears on his hand. "You have paid me already," he said; and Kate knew that he meant it. Afterwards she questioned him a little about the case. "It was a gastro-enterostomy, without complications," he explained. "A very simple thing, done every day." He described the operation in some detail, Kate watching him in amaze. "You can't tell me that a thing like that is done every day! Jacques, be honest--isn't it a very remarkable operation for a country doctor to perform?" "Oh--for a country doctor, perhaps. For a surgeon who has had some experience, no." "You are a surgeon, then, not a doctor?" He smiled, that warm, flashing smile which always fell like a gleam of sunlight across her heart. "I am--whatever people need me to be." It was true--physician, nurse, companion, guardian, friend--Jacques Benoix was always whatever people needed him to be. In that moment, Kate realized that he had given up a great career to bring his sick wife into the country. One of the closest bonds between them was a love for music. Kate's singing, untrained and faulty though it was, gave keen pleasure to his starved ears, and often he brought his little son to hear her; a boy of ten, rather grave and shy, but with his father's beautiful smile. Sometimes there were duets to be tried out together; Kildare, when he was at home, listening tolerantly and beating time out of time to the pleasant sounds they made.