The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes:-- "You haven't answered my _last_ question yet, have you?" "Not yet," said the doctor, with strange quietness also. The boy had never before heard that tone from his father. "It's sad being a doctor, isn't it?" he suggested, studying his father's expression. "What do _you_ know about sad? Who told _you_ anything about sad?" muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness. "Nobody _had_ to tell me! I knew without being told." "Run along now." "Now I'll walk along, but I won't run along. I'll walk away from you, but I won't run away from you." He wandered across the room, and stood with his hand reluctantly turning the knob. Then with a long, silent look at his father--he closed the door between them. III THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR DR. BIRNEY stood motionless in the middle of the room with his gaze riveted on the door through which his son had lingeringly disappeared. Some one of the world's greatest painters, chancing to enter, might worthily have desired to paint him--putting no questions as to who the man was or what he was; or what darkening or brightening history stretched behind him; or what entanglement of right and wrong lay around and within: painting only the unmistakable human signs he witnessed, and leaving his portrait for thousands of people to look at afterwards and make out of it what they could--through kinship with the good and evil in themselves: Velasquez, with his brush moving upon those areas of lonely struggle which sometimes lie with their wrecks at the bottom of the sea of human eyes; Franz Hals, fixing the cares which hover too long around our mouths; Vandyck, sitting in the shadow of the mystery that slants across all mortal shoulders; Rembrandt, drawn apart into the dignity that invests colossal disappointment. Any merciless, masterful limner of them all in a mood to portray those secret passions which drive men, especially men of middle age, towards safer deeps upon the rocks. He had a well-set soldierly figure and the swarthy roughened face that results from years of exposure to weather--a face looking as if inwardly scarred by the tempests of his character but unwrinkled by the outer years. Both face and figure breathed the silent impassiveness of the regular who has been through campaigns enough already but is enlisted for life and for whatsoever duty may bring; he standing there in some wise palpably draped in the ideals of his profession as the soldier keeps his standard waving high somewhere near his tent, to remind him of the greatness that he guards and of the greatness that guards him.