He closed the drawer, stood for a moment looking at the light in the window of Margaret's room, and then, shrugging his broad shoulders, he turned away. He met no one on the stairs, but as he passed out at the front door he saw the flare of his uncle's cigar and the wrinkled, brooding face and gray head and beard at the end of the veranda. Going down the wide brick walk, which was edged by rows of well-trimmed boxwood, he descried, near the gate, a willowy figure in white. It was Margaret. She looked up as he approached, and in the piteous lines of her face he read her final desperate appeal. “I thought you were in your room,” he said, in an effort at gentle deception. “Madge, old girl, I'll have to take you in hand.” He passed his fingers playfully under her cold chin. “You are on a direct road to a thirty-day course of that very tonic you despised so much last spring. No dinner to-day and no supper to-night. I don't get any fee for doctoring you, but I'm going to keep you in good shape as an advertisement, if for nothing else. I don't intend to have my patients throwing it in my face that they won't believe in me until I cure my own family.” She did not return his smile, and drew back from his caress as if she half resented it. “Are you really going to see Fred?” she asked, falteringly, her eyes fixed coldly, half fearfully, on his through the dim, vague starlight. “Yes, Madge,” he answered, simply. “I've thought it over deliberately and calmly, with no feeling of ill-will toward him, and I can't see my duty in any other way.” “To-night?” She breathed hard, her hand on her breast. “Right away, sister; that is, if he is in town.” She moved a little nearer to him. He saw the hand which started toward his arm tremble, as it diverted its course to one of the palings of the fence, which it clutched in visible desperation. “Do you realize,” she asked, “that to--to tell him what Uncle Tom intends to do in case he and I don't give each other up may insult him? He is not a man to care about a girl's fortune; he hasn't shown that he wants his father's money. He knows that I don't let such things weigh with me. What you are now starting out to do may be the immediate cause of--of our both _defying you!_”