* * * * * About a year later there reached Dr. Birney one morning a piece of evidence as to how his reputation was spreading: from another neighborhood a farmer of small means rode to his door and besought him to come and see a member of his family: this request implied that the regular family physician had been passed over, supplanted; and when the poor turn against their physicians and discharge them, it is a bad sign indeed--for the physicians. The doctor upon setting out sent his thoughts to this professional brother who had been discredited: he would gladly have saved him from the wound. A few miles up the pike he was surprised to meet a well-known physician from the city: they knew each other socially and checked their horses to exchange greetings. Dr. Birney lost no time in saying:-- "If you are on the way to my house, I'll turn back." "I'm going to the Ousleys'. Professor Ousley asked me yesterday to come out and see Mrs. Ousley: he said it was her wish." The two physicians quickly parted with embarrassment. As Dr. Birney drove on he had received the wound which sometimes leaves a physician with the feeling that he has tasted the bitterness of his own death: he himself had been pushed aside--discarded from the household that meant most to him as physician and man. He pulled his horse's head into a dirt road and crossed to another turnpike and visited his new patient and went on to another county seat and put up his horse at a livery stable to be groomed and fed and took his dinner at the little tavern and wandered aimlessly about the town and started back towards sundown and reached home late in the night and went to his rooms without awaking his wife. As he lighted his lamp in the library under its rays he saw a note from Mrs. Ousley to them, asking their company to supper next evening. His wife had pencilled across the top of the page a message that she would not go. "It is their good-by to me," he said; "when my wife knows that they have discharged me, as a woman understands another woman in such a matter, she will know the reason; and she will see fully at last what she began to see long since." When he went to the Ousleys', Mrs. Ousley came forward to greet him at the side of her husband, and she gave him both hands. And she did what she had never done before--she tried with her little hands to take his big ones--the hands that had saved her life; and out of the intensity and solemnity of her gratitude she looked him in the eyes until the lids fell over hers. It was like saying:-- It is not your fault, it is not my fault, it is not the fault of any of us: it is life and the fault of life. As I let you go, dear friend, I cling to you.