“Exactly! And there’s where Janvier and I were wrong, not to have known it. Anita, with a far finer vision than we had, often warned us that the bent bow was strung too tight. But we couldn’t see it so; men are blind, sometimes, in the heat and burden of the day. Richmond was six feet tall, and broad in proportion. A magnificent physique! That’s what we went by. We laughed at Anita’s fears—accused her of plantation-coddling. And there was a lot to be done, too, that year after the Janviers were married. It was a horrible winter, disease stalking everywhere, especially among the ‘coloreds.’ Both Janvier and Richmond were overworked. You would have thought that the sort of office Janvier had, with so many colored patients, would have hurt his practice. Not a bit of it. People felt a trust in him. Children always took to him, and he was very successful, as you know, in children’s diseases. “It happened that in the following spring, Janvier was suddenly called to Toronto to see his mother, who had but a few days to live. He asked me to look after things a little, in his absence. Of course, I said I would, but I told him, half-laughingly, that I hoped to goodness Charles Richmond wouldn’t treat me to a cyclone of the soul; and if he did, I should turn the hose on him. Janvier looked rather troubled, but said he didn’t expect anything of the sort. In fact, a storm had occurred only the day before, and another such tempest wouldn’t be due for a long time. It struck me that if I’d been in Frank’s place, I would have been worried about leaving Anita. Very likely, Frank _was_ worried, for he had tried to persuade her to visit her sister while he was away. But the girl was tremendously interested in some sick little pickaninnies she was helping both doctors to pull out of various croups and itises, and she felt that those children needed her. And, anyway, Frank would be back in a few days.” A new tone had crept into the sculptor’s voice, and Gerald guessed that his uncle was about to speak of things hitherto untold. “Poor Stevedear,” he thought, with a thrill of loving sympathy, “he’s come to the place where the novels always have a row of asterisks, or something.”