"This is the third time I've nearly broken my neck over that miserable dog," chidingly announced the nurse, later in the day, as she came out of the room and chanced to meet the Master on the landing. "Do please drive him away. _I've_ tried to do it, but he only snarls at me. And in a dangerous case like this----" "Leave him alone," briefly ordered the Master. But when the nurse, sniffing, passed on, he called Lad over to him. Reluctantly, the dog quitted the door and obeyed the summons. "Quiet!" ordered the Master, speaking very slowly and distinctly. "You must keep quiet. _Quiet!_ Understand?" Lad understood. Lad always understood. He must not bark. He must move silently. He must make no unnecessary sound. But, at least, the Master had not forbidden him to snarl softly and loathingly at that detestable white-clad woman every time she stepped over him. So there was one grain of comfort. Gently, the Master called him downstairs and across the living-room, and put him out of the house. For, after all, a shaggy eighty-pound dog is an inconvenience stretched across a sick-room doorsill. Three minutes later, Lad had made his way through an open window into the cellar and thence upstairs; and was stretched out, head between paws, at the threshold of the Mistress' room. On his thrice-a-day visits, the doctor was forced to step over him, and was man enough to forbear to curse. Twenty times a day, the nurse stumbled over his massive, inert body, and fumed in impotent rage. The Master, too, came back and forth from the sick-room, with now and then a kindly word for the suffering collie, and again and again put him out of the house. But always Lad managed, by hook or crook, to be back on guard within a minute or two. And never once did the door of the Mistress' room open that he did not make a strenuous attempt to enter. Servants, nurse, doctor, and Master repeatedly forgot he was there, and stubbed their toes across his body. Sometimes their feet drove agonizingly into his tender flesh. But never a whimper or growl did the pain wring from him. "_Quiet!_" had been the command, and he was obeying. And so it went on, through the awful days and the infinitely worse nights. Except when he was ordered away by the Master, Lad would not stir from his place at the door. And not even the Master's authority could keep him away from it for five minutes a day. The dog ate nothing, drank practically nothing, took no exercise; moved not one inch, of his own will, from the doorway. In vain did the glories of Autumn woods call to him. The rabbits would be thick, out yonder in the forest, just now. So would the squirrels--against which Lad had long since sworn a blood-feud (and one of which it had ever been his futile life ambition to catch).