"That will never do!" he said with a backward motion of his head toward the solitary chair at the breakfast-table. "What right have you to defraud a girl out of all that happiness?" "I am not defrauding a girl out of all that happiness: I am being defrauded. I am not the culprit: I am the victim. As a consequence of trying to save the lives of other husbands, I have nearly come to my own death as a bachelor: I have about succumbed to inanition: I am a mere Hamlet of soliloquy--and abstention." It was the last playfulness of boyhood friendship, of a return to old ways of jesting when jesting meant nothing. But the glance into the breakfast room--those rallying words--the return of the snowball into the face--were the ending of a past: each felt that this was enough of it. As young Ousley rode away, he wheeled his horse at the distance of some yards and called back formally:-- "Mrs. Ousley would like to see you as soon as you can come, doctor." It was a professional command. "I'll come immediately after breakfast." "Thank you." "Thank _you!_" They had assumed another relation in life: on one side of a chasm was a young husband with his bride; on the other, the family physician. As Dr. Birney poured out his coffee and buttered his biscuit, he said to himself that now the bread of life was being buttered. When he reached the Ousleys', the youthful husband met him on the veranda and threw an arm around his shoulder affectionately and led him in; and when some time later they reappeared, both talked gravely and parted, bound by a new bond of dependence and helpfulness between man and man. For the next few days there developed in Dr. Birney a novel consciousness that his interest in marriage had enormously deepened, but that interest in his own marriage had received a setback: the feeling was genuine, and it troubled him. The tentative advances into social life that he had been making seemed to have ended in blind paths; the growing ties snapped like threads upon which some displaced weight has fallen. What he had been looking for it seemed to him that he had found too late in Josephine Ousley. Had he found her before her marriage, he would have looked at no other, nor have wavered a year. The actual significance of this was that he had encountered one of the persistent dreams of mankind--the dream of ideal love and ideal marriage with one who is unattainable.