“Here is Mrs. St. John Deloraine at last,” cried Margaret, starting to run to the window; but she was so weak that she tripped, and would have fallen had Barton not caught her lightly. “Oh, how stupid you must think me!” she said, blushing. And Barton thought he had never seen anything so pretty. “Once for all, I don’t think you stupid, or backward, or anything else that you call yourself.” But at that very moment the door opened, and Mrs. St John Deloraine entered, magnificently comfortable in furs, and bringing a fresh air of hospitality and content with existence into the room. “Oh, _you_ are here!” she cried, “and I have almost missed you. Now you _must_ stay to dinner. You need not dress; we are all alone, Margaret and I.” So he did stop to dine, and pauper hypochondriacs, eager for his society (which was always cheering), knocked, and rang also, at his door in vain. It was an excellent dinner; and, on the wings of the music Mrs. St John Deloraine was playing in the front drawing-room, two happy hours passed lightly over Barton and Margaret, into the backward, where all hours--good and evil--abide, remembered or forgotten. CHAPTER XIII.--Another Patient. “Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes! Comme dans le chant de Ruckert.” --Théophile Gautier. “So you think a flying machine impossible, sir, and me, I presume, a fanatic? Well, well, you have Eusebius with you. ‘Such an one,’ he says--meaning me, and inventors like me--‘is a little crazed with the humors of melancholy.’” The speaker was the man whom Barton had rescued from the cogs and wheels and springs of an infuriated engine. Barton could not but be interested in the courage and perseverance of this sufferer, whom he was visiting in hospital. The young surgeon had gone to inspect the room in Paterson’s Rants, and had found it, as he more or less expected, the conventional den of the needy inventor. Our large towns are full of such persons. They are the Treasure Hunters of cities and of civilization--the modern seekers for the Philosopher’s Stone. At the end of a vista of dreams they behold the great Discovery made perfect, and themselves the winners of fame and of wealth incalculable.