“You shan’t go downtown, to-day, do you hear!” commanded Tom. “This is a busy day for me, but if you don’t give me your word you’ll stay home, I’ll stay home myself to make you.” He went out and telephoned to David’s office. He came back with a doctor. Tonsillitis. Tom nursed him. Mrs. Lario found there was really little she could do. David had an assortment of dainties to sip. “This won’t hurt your throat.” He had books. He had a splendid array of cushions architected for his back to prop him for reading. Mrs. Deane came and found her nephew lying happy in the large front room. “More sun,” Tom explained. “It was no job moving the bed.” “It is wonderful, child, how Mr. Rennard nurses you. I would no more dream of interfering.... You do not appear to be very busy downtown, Mr. Rennard.” Tom laughed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Deane. Nothing to do at all. But do not give me away.” David understood. “Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!” David could not forget such things. Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that _he_ was selfish: that _he_ had no idea of service. This one rift there was in the harmony of Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a certain stress and reminder. “Here is how _I_ serve my friend.” Yet David could not be sure. The rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for his own lazy selfishness might altogether lie in his own guilty conscience. What did he ever do for Tom? So far as he could see, what did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a sliding down greased paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the way? Lying there on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom had not come back so soon from work in order to see how he was. And wishing this, he felt his guilt the more.... In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going, and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed at his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear no word of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were nothing to Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David respect for his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships with man or woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who worked for him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But David was a monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue nor of the sin of man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some chill Limbo. Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty ways, like lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone, muttering afar, doing no work upon him.