"You mean that you think I should give it up?" Catherine stared at the hard, jutting line of his jaw, at his eyes, feverish, sunken. "Charles, you can't mean you blame me for Spencer's accident?" "No." He spoke sharply, denying himself. "It might have happened anyway. I know that." "Oh!" A long, escaping sigh. "If you had blamed me--I couldn't have endured it." And then, "It's hard, not to blame myself." "That's just it." Charles moved forward, eagerly. "It's frightening. I thought you might feel, well, that you couldn't risk it. Leaving them. I want to be fair, Catherine." "If you had been away, on a business trip"--Catherine was motionless except for the slow movement of her lips--"and this had happened, I should have sent for you. Would you have blamed yourself? Or given up your work? Oh, yes, I know you'll say that's different. It isn't so different. It wouldn't be, if you didn't make it so." "Oh, my work." He settled back into his chair. "I've got to tell you things about that. I don't know how interested you are. You've been engrossed." He paused, but Catherine did not speak. "It does concern you! And it's a frightful mess." His eyes were haggard, angry, and his shoulders sagged in the chair with a curious, weary dejection, unlike their usual squared confidence. "I haven't told you. They didn't put me in as head of the clinic. The committee recognized the value of my work in organizing the clinic"--he was quoting, sneeringly--"but preferred to install a medical psychiatrist. You know it was decided last year, unofficially, that I was to be appointed the instant the funds were clear." "What happened? Who is the head?" Pity extricated Catherine from her own floundering. She knew, swiftly, what had happened, as she remembered a sentence in that letter from Henrietta. "A Dr. Beck. What happened? The usual thing. The doctors in the town stirred up the usual brawl. This was a medical clinic. No layman could manage it. Any fool with a year of anatomy could do better than a specialist. If you can cut off a leg or an appendix, you know instinctively everything about mental disorders or feeble-mindedness or anything else that touches psychology." "But you had discussed that with the committee, and they----" "They agreed with me last year. But they say they didn't realize popular opinion. There was underhanded play going on before I heard about it, and the thing was settled. I don't know just how. It's that feeling--doctors are all wise, established powers, mystic, and we scientists are new. If a man can cure the measles, he knows more about paranoia than I know!" Catherine clasped her hands, pulses tingling in her finger tips. "What has happened to Miss Partridge?" she asked. A dull, brick-glow mounted in Charles's face--anger, or humiliation. "Has she been ousted, too?" insisted Catherine. "Dr. Beck has made her his assistant."