Meanwhile Sheila had followed the superintendent to her office. "It's a case of cerebral hemorrhages. The man is no fool; he knows his condition, and he's been getting increasingly hard to take care of every minute since he found out. Maybe you've heard of him. He's Brandle, the coal magnate. Quite alone in the world; no children, and his wife died some few years ago. He's very peculiar, and no one seems to know what to say to him or do for him. I'm a little afraid--" and the superintendent paused to consider her words before committing herself. "I think perhaps there have been too many offers of prayers and scriptural readings for his taste." "Probably he'd prefer the last _Town Topics_ or the latest detective story." Sheila shook her head violently. "Why can't a man be allowed to die the way he chooses--instead of your way, or my way, or the Reverend Mr. Grumble's way?" "Miss Barry is on the case now, and I'm afraid he's shocked her into--" "Perpetual devotion." Sheila grinned sympathetically as she completed the sentence. They had called her Prayer-Book Barry her probation year because of her unswerving religious point of view, and her years of training had only served to increase it. The picture of anything as sensitively pious as Prayer-Book Barry helping a coal magnate to depart this temporal world in his own chosen fashion was too much for Sheila's sense of the grotesque. She threw back her head and laughed. Peal after peal rang out and over the transom of the superintendent's office just as Miss Jacobs passed. It took no great powers of penetration to identify the laugh; a look of satisfaction crept into the green eyes. "Quite dramatic and brutally unfeeling I call it," she murmured. "But it will make an entertaining story to tell Mr. Brooks. He thinks Leerie is such a little tinseled saint." Ten minutes later Sheila O'Leary followed Miss Maxwell into the large tower room of the sanitarium to relieve Miss Barry from duty. As she took her first look from the doorway she almost forgot herself and laughed again. The room might have been a scene set for a farce or a comic opera. Propped up in bed, with multitudinous pillows about him, was a very mammoth of a man in heliotrope-silk pajamas. His face was as round and full and bucolic as a poster advertising some specific brew of beer. Surmounting the face was a sparse fringe of white hair standing erect, while an isolated lock mounted guard over a receding forehead. It was evident that the natural expression of the face was good-natured, indulgent, easygoing, but at the moment of Sheila's entrance it was contorted into something that might have served for a cartoon of a choleric full moon. The eyes were rolling frantically in every direction but that from which the presumable infliction came, for seated at the bedside, with a booklet of evening prayer open on her lap, was Miss Barry, reading aloud in a sweet, gentle voice.