He saw the neurologist as the latter circled the plaster cupids to the entrance of the house--a heavy man with a broad, smooth face, thinlipped like a priest, with staring yellow gloves. Anthony remained in the lower hall, but no demand for his assistance sounded from above. When the specialist descended, he flashed a glance, as bitingly swift and cold as glacial water, over Anthony, then nodded in the direction of the garden. “Miss Annot tells me that you are sleeping in the house,” he said when they were outside; “on the chance that she might need you for her father... she will. He is at the point of mental dissolution.” An involuntary repulsion possessed Anthony at the detached manner in which the other pronounced these hopeless words. “Nothing may be done; that is--it is not desirable that anything should. I am telling you this so that you can act intelligently. Rufus Hardinge knows it; there was a consultation at Geneva, which he approved. “He is,” he continued with a warmer, more personal note, “a very distinguished biologist; his investigations, his conclusions, have been invaluable.” He glanced at an incongruous, minute, jewelled watch on his wrist, and continued more quickly. “Ten years ago he should have stopped all work, vegetated--he was burning up rapidly; merely a reduced amount of labor would have accomplished little for his health or subject. And we couldn't spare his labor, no mere prolongation of life would have justified that loss of knowledge, progress. It was his position; he insisted upon it and we concurred... he chose... insanity. “Miss Annot is not aware of this; he must have every moment possible; every note is priceless. The end will come--now, at any time.” He had reached the small, canary yellow Dreux landaulet waiting for him, and stepped into it with a sharp nod. “You may expect violence,” he added, as the car gathered momentum. But that evening in the dim quietude of the piazza the biologist seemed to have recovered completely his mental poise. He spoke in a buoyant vein of the great men he had known, celebrated names in the world of the arts, in politics and science. He recalled Braisted, the astronomer, searching relaxation in the Boulevard school of French fictionists. “I told him,” he chuckled at the mild, scholastic humor, “that he had been peeping too long at Venus.” Annot was steeped in an inscrutable silence. For the first time, Anthony was actually aware of her features: she had a broad, low brow swept by the coppery hair loosely tied at the back; her eyes resembled her father's, they were amber-colored, and singularly candid in their interest in all that passed before them; while her nose tilted up slightly above a mouth frankly large. It was the face of a boy, he decided, but felt instantly that he had fallen far short of the fact--the allurement, the perfection, of her youthful maturity hung overwhelmingly about her the challenge of sex.