"Look here, Miss Carroll," he said quietly, "let's get down to brass tacks. For eleven years you have lain on your back, allowing yourself to be waited on, coddled, wrapped in cotton wool. You have had the companionship of your father, who is the finest man in the world, but whose whole life is wrapped up in you, and who has sacrificed that life to your whims and your desires. Your father was never meant to be buried down here; not with that personality and fine brain. Think of the doors which should be open to him and which your illness has closed,--travel, society, the exploration of places and people, instead of a rather pretty, very narrow, Connecticut _rut_! You have had Sarah--sentimental to a degree under a rocky exterior, ready and anxious to work her fingers to the bone to please you. You have had an entire village at your beck and call; have dispensed justice and advice from your bed like Royalty; and you have thrived on it, my dear lady, thrived on the adoration and the sacrifice, and on your own martyrdom. Now, I am here solely to give you a chance to repay your father and all the others for their love and care and coddling. Do you realize that your father is a comparatively young man? That, by tying him to your bedside you have narrowed his life down until it consists of this room, this house, this tiny village? It's up to you to give something to your father. It may cost you pain. But I wonder if you have any idea of what you have cost him in heartache? Are you willing to make the effort, if only for his sake?" No one in all my life had ever spoken to me like that! I was so hurt, so outraged, so bewildered, it seemed as if I just couldn't live a minute longer, with that cool, cutting voice in my ears. "You--you--brute!" I said, choking, "It's not fair! Do you mean to tell me that I am selfish and unkind? That I don't love my father? That I am a useless, worthless hypochondriac?" He smiled. "Perhaps I wouldn't put it quite so strongly," he suggested courteously. I shut my hands hard under the bedclothes and held my head very high. "Very well," I told him, rather viciously, "I will do all you say, if Father and Doctor MacAllister are agreed." I could feel the red spots burning on my cheeks. And in my mind I was saying, over and over, like a child, "I'll show you! _I'll show you!_" I think I almost hoped I should die--just to make him sorry. And it was so hard to keep the tears back. I wouldn't cry. I _wouldn't_. I cried. Suddenly, his arm was around me, and his voice, so changed, so immeasurably gentle, was saying, very close, "You poor little kid!" "I hate you!" I said, at that. The arm tightened; then dropped. Dr. Denton rose.