or your child--your laundress, perhaps, or your maid, or one of these nurses----” “Oh, stop! stop!” she cried. “I am quite aware,” he said, quietly, “that these things are not calculated to preserve the peace of mind of a young mother. You are horrified when I tell you of them--yet you clamour for the right to have Mrs. Abbott tell you of them! I warn you, Sylvia--you have married a rich man, who is exposed to the attacks of cunning and unscrupulous enemies. You, as his wife, are exactly as much exposed--possibly even more so. Therefore when I see you entering into what I know to be a dangerous intimacy, I must have the right to say to you, This shall stop, and I tell you, there can never be any safety or peace of mind for either of us, so long as you attempt to deny me that right.” 5. Dr. Gibson took his departure three or four days later; and before he went, he came to give her his final blessing; talking to her, as he phrased it, “like a Dutch uncle.” “You must understand,” he said, “I am almost old enough to be your grandfather. I have four sons, anyone of whom might have married you, if they had had the good fortune to be in Castleman County at the critical time. So you must let me be frank with you.” Sylvia indicated that she was willing. “We don’t generally talk to women about these matters; because they’ve no standard by which to judge, and they almost always fly off and have hysterics. Their case seems to them exceptional and horrible, their husbands the blackest criminals in the whole tribe.” He paused for a moment. “Now, Mrs. van Tuiver, the disease which has made your baby blind is probably what we call gonorrhea. When it gets into the eyes, it has very terrible results. But it doesn’t often get into the eyes, and for the most part it’s a trifling affair, that we don’t worry about. I know there are a lot of new-fangled notions, but I’m an old man, with experience of my own, and I have to have things proven to me. I know that with as much of this disease as we doctors see, if it was a deadly disease, there’d be nobody left alive in the world. As I say, I don’t like to discuss it with women; but it was not I who forced the matter upon your attention----” “Pray go on, Dr. Gibson,” she said. “I really wish to know all that you will tell me.” “The question has come up, how was this disease brought to your child? Dr. Perrin suggested that possibly he--you understand his fear; and possibly he is correct. But it seems to me an illustration of the unwisdom of a physician’s departing from his proper duty, which is to cure people. If you wish to find out who brought a disease, what you need is a detective. I know, of course, that there are people who can combine the duties of physician and detective--and that without any previous preparation or study of either profession.” He waited for this irony to sink in; and Sylvia also waited, patiently.