There was almost panic, but Macroe was a man, too, and proceeded to do his work without a word. The great surgeon, his hands now trembling beyond disguise, went back to the officers' room, took off his white robes, and returned to his home. There he wrote his resignation to the directors of St. Jerome's, and his resignation from other offices of honor and responsibility. Then he sent for a medical man, an old friend, and held out his shaking hand to him: "The damn thing won't go," he said, pointing also to his head. "Too much work," the doctor replied, of course. But the great surgeon, who was a man of clear views, added impersonally, "Too much everything, I guess!" There followed the usual prescription, making the sick man a wanderer and pariah--first to Europe, "to get rid of me," the surgeon growled; then to Georgia for golf, to Montana for elk, to Canada for salmon, and so forth. Each time the sick man returned with a thin coat of tan that peeled off in a few days, and with those shaking hands that suggested immediately another journey to another climate. Until it happened finally that the men of St. Jerome's who had first talked of the date of their chief's return merely raised their eyebrows at the mention of his name. "Done for, poor old boy!" and the great surgeon read it with his lynx eyes, in the faces of the men he met at his clubs. His mouth drew together sourly and his back sloped. "Fifty-two," he muttered. "God, that is too early--something ought to pull me together." So he went on trying this and that, while his friends said he was "resting," until he had slipped from men's thoughts. One day Percival of St. Jerome's, one of those boys he had growled at and cursed in former times, met him crawling down the avenue to his quietest club, and the old surgeon took him by the arm--he was gray in face and his neck was wasting away--and told the story of his troubles--as he would to anyone these days. The young man listened respectfully. Then he spoke of the old Inn, of the Brotherhood, of the Master and what he had done for miserable men, who had despaired. The famous surgeon, shaking his head as one who has heard of these miracles many times and found them naught, was drinking it all in, nevertheless. "He takes a man," said the young surgeon, "who doesn't want to live and makes him fall in love with life." Dr. Augustus Norton sniffed. "In love with life! That's good! If your Wonder of the Ages can make a man of fifty fall in love with anything, I must try him." He laughed a sneering laugh, the feeble merriment of doubt. "Ah, Doctor!" cried the young man, "you must go and live with the Master. And then come back to us at St. Jerome's: for we need you!" And the great surgeon, touched to the heart by these last words, said: "Well, what's the name of your miracle-worker, and where is he to be found?... I might as well try all the cures--write a book on 'em one of these days!"...