"I was sensitive, and when I heard Stewart call out your name in the mail and saw this man step up as if to take the letter, I took it. And if you'll take a brace and decide it's worth while you can have it. It's addressed in a woman's handwriting, not a Thomas Smith style of pinching letters out of a penholder and squeezing them off the pen point. Lie down there, man!" For Jim was sitting up, listening intently. With trembling fingers he took the letter and read it eagerly. Then he looked at Carey with eyes in which listlessness had given place to determination. "Doctor, I was ready to throw up the game five minutes ago. Now I'll do anything to get back to strength and work." "You don't seem very joyous, however," the doctor responded. "Joy don't belong to me. We parted company some years ago. But life is mine." "And duty?" "Yes, and duty. Say, Doctor, if you'd ever cared all there was in you to care for one woman, and then had to give her up, you'd know how I feel. And if, then, a sort of service opened up before you, you'd know how I welcome this." Jim's face, white from his illness, was wonderfully handsome now, and he looked at his friend with that eager longing for sympathy men of his mould need deeply. Horace Carey stood up beside the bed and, looking down with a face where intense feeling and self-control were manifest, said in a low voice: "I have cared. I have had to give up, and I know what service means." CHAPTER VI WHEN THE GRASSHOPPER WAS A BURDEN Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. --HABAKKUK. While Jim Shirley was getting back to health, he and his physician had many long talks regarding the West and its future; its products and its people. There was only one topic in which Horace Carey was but intermittently interested, namely, Jim's neighbors--the Aydelots. At least, it seemed so to Jim, who had loved Asher from boyhood, and had taken Virginia on sight and paid homage to her for all the years that followed. Jim accepted the doctor's manner at first as a mere personal trait, but, having nothing to do except to lie and think, he grew curiously annoyed over it. "I wish you'd tell me what ails you?" he blurted out one evening, as the two sat together in the twilight. "About what?" the doctor inquired. "If I knew, I might even risk my own medicine to get over it." "Don't joke, Horace Carey, not with a frail invalid. I've tried all day to talk to you about my neighbors and you turn the subject away as if it was of no consequence, and now, tonight, you settle down and say, 'Tell me about the Aydelots.' Why do you want to hear in the dark what you won't listen to in the daylight?"