Gita ripped off her gauntlets and threw them on the floor of the hall. Her broad-brimmed hat followed a yard farther on. “What on earth can it be?” she demanded impatiently. “Don’t tell me you’re engaged.” She glared at Elsie, who had removed her hat and thrown herself into one of the deep chairs by the window. “No, no, my child, it’s not that or I shouldn’t have dared to face you. I’d have prepared the way by a note——” “Well! What is it? What is it?” “Did I ever tell you that I have a brother? I’ve hardly dared mention the word man in your presence.” “Your mother once said something about a son out West, somewhere or other, and of course I assumed that those snap-shots all over the house of a young man in khaki were his. Not bad-looking as men go. Has he struck it rich?” “I shall begin at the beginning.” Elsie had labored too long at craftsmanship to tell a story haphazardly. “You know, his medical course was interrupted by the war, and when he came home he returned to Columbia to finish. He hated to have me work, but mother’s income had diminished like that of everyone else, and he knew he could do far better by us later if he had a profession than if he chucked it and took a job with little or no future in it. Besides, he was always mad on the subject of surgery. He used to dissect rabbits in the back yard when he was eight, and when he was ten the cook broke her arm and he had it in splints before the doctor got there. Then, too, he had a lot of experience in the army, where he was always in attendance on some one of the surgeons. He got the Croix de Guerre for operating under fire when the surgeon in charge of the hospital had been killed, and then coolly loading the patients into an ambulance and driving it off as the Germans rushed the town. Well, he graduated about two years ago and went to Butte, Montana, with a fellow graduate—a doctor of medicine—whose father was in charge of a hospital there and had offered him the position of assistant surgeon. He hated to leave New York, to say nothing of us, but he felt that was not a chance to be missed. Well, there he was, pegging away, when what do you think happened?” “How on earth should I know?” asked Gita crossly. “Do come to the point. I always read the last page of a story first, and you might have given me the climax as a starter and told me his biography later. I suppose he married a rich patient.”