"Professor Opdyke is no pot-boiler," Brenton interrupted. "It's not money that he counts; it's the thing itself he's after." "What thing?" the doctor asked, with seeming carelessness. Brenton flashed into sudden fire. "The finishing out his work. The trying to add one little bit to the sum total of permanent knowledge. The kind of thing you do yourself, doctor, once your patients give you time to get away from the trail of their beastly aches and pains." The doctor eyed his companion with a sort of grim amusement. "That last phrase sounds suspicious, Brenton," he remarked. "Are you also--" Brenton did not wait for him to finish out the question. "No; I am not," he snapped, with a testiness that would have been a healthy mental symptom, had it not betrayed the fact that his nerves were dangerously on edge. The doctor, still watching him from above his pipe, judged it would be well to change the subject. "Besides," he added casually; "I fancy that Reed may be an entering factor." "Reed?" "Yes, with his father. The suspense is telling on them all, telling badly on the professor. From the point of view of the family physician, I believe it is any amount worse than accepting even a surety of the worst." "What do you call the worst?" Brenton asked flatly. "That Reed would have to lie there on his back, till the remotest end of time." For an instant, the old light flared up in Brenton's eyes. Rising, with a backward thrust of his chair that sent it crashing against a table, he tramped the length of the room and back again. "God help him!" he said, low. "You think that such a thing is possible?" The doctor nodded curtly. He loved Reed as he would have loved a son of his own, and it hurt him to put into words even the possibility. "It is in the limits of the possible," he answered. Again the tramp across the floor and back again. Then Brenton burst out fiercely. "And I can sit here and whimper about my fate, that I am the square peg in the round hole, while he--Doctor Keltridge, you don't mean it has come to that?"