only she wouldn’t grow flabby every time a pair of masculine eyes are focused her way!”

“But it wasn’t the business office this time.” Miss Maxwell herself smiled as she made the statement. “It was the patient himself. He asked for a change.”

“A man that’s a man for all he’s a patient. God bless his soul!” and a look of sudden radiant delight swept the girl’s face. “What’s he here for? Jilting chorus-girl—fatty degeneration of his check-book?”

The superintendent shook her head. “He doesn’t happen to be that kind. He’s a newspaper-man—a personal friend of Doctor Dempsy’s. Overwork, he thinks, and for a year he’s been trying to put him back on his feet. It’s a case of nerves, with nothing discoverable back of it so far as he can see, but he wants us to try. Doctor Nichols has analyzed him; teeth have been X-rayed; eyes, nose, and throat gone over. There’s nothing radically wrong with stomach or kidneys; heart shows nervous affection, nothing more. He ought to be fit physically and he isn’t. Miss Jacobs reports a maximum of an hour’s sleep in twenty-four. Doctor Dempsy writes it’s a case for a nurse, not a doctor, and the most tactful, intuitive nurse we have in the sanitarium. Please take it, Leerie.”

The girl stiffened under the two hands placed on her shoulders, while something indescribably baffling and impenetrable took possession of her whole being. Her voice became almost curt. “Sorry, can’t. Bargain, you know. Wouldn’t have come back at all if you hadn’t promised I should not be asked to take those cases.”

“I’ll not ask you to take another, but you know how I feel about any patient Doctor Dempsy sends to us. Anything I can do means paying back a little on the great debt I owe him, the debt of a wonderful training. That’s why I ask—this once.” A look almost fanatical came into the face of the superintendent.

The girl smiled wistfully up at her. “Wish I could! Honest I do, Miss Max! I’d fight for the life of any patient under the old San roof—man, woman, or child; but I’ll not baby-tend unhealthy-minded young men. You know as well as I how it’s always been: they lose their heads and I my temper—results, the same. I end by telling them just what I think; they pay their bills and leave the same day. The San loses a perfectly good annual patient, and the business office feels sore at me. No, I’m no good at frequent pulses and cerebral massage; leave that to Coppy.”

There was no stinging sarcasm in the girl’s voice. She reached out an impulsive hand and slipped it into one of the older woman’s, leaving it there long enough to give it a quick, firm grip. “Remember, it’s only three years—and it takes so little to set tongues wagging again. So let’s stick fast to the bargain, dear; only nervous old ladies or the bad surgical cases.”

“Very well. Only—if you could change your mind, let me know. In the mean time I’ll put Miss Saunders on,” and the superintendent turned away, troubled and unsatisfied.

An hour later Sheila O’Leary came upon Miss Saunders with her new patient, and the patient was the man of the omnibus—the man with the haunting, deep-set eyes. Unnoticed, she watched them sitting on a bench by the pond, the nurse droning aloud from a book, the man sagging listlessly, plainly hearing nothing and seeing nothing. The picture set Sheila O’Leary shuddering. If it was a case of ’phobia, God help the poor man with Saunders coupled to his nerves! Cumbersome, big-hearted, and hopelessly dull, Saunders was incapable of nursing with tactful insight a nerve-racked man. In the whole wide realm of disease there seemed nothing more tragic to Sheila than a victim of ’phobia. It turned normal men and women into pitiful children, afraid of the dark, groping out for the hand to reassure them, to put heart and courage back in them again—the hand that nine cases out of ten never reaches them in time.

With an impulsive toss of her head, Sheila O’Leary swung about in her tracks. She would break her own bargain for this once. She would go to Miss Max and ask to be put on the case. Here was a soul sick unto death with a fear of something, and Saunders was nursing it! What did it matter if it was a man or a dog, as long as she could get into the dark after him and show him the way out! Her resolve held to the point of branching paths, and there she stopped to consider again.

Peter’s eyes were on the swans; there was nothing to the general droop of the shoulders, the thrust-forward bend of the neck, the hollowing of the smooth-shaven cheeks, and the graying of the hair above the temples to write him other than an average overworked or habitually harassed business man here for rest and treatment. If Sheila was mistaken—if there was no abnormal mental condition back of it all, no legitimate reason for not holding fast to the compact she had made three years before with herself to leave men—young, old, or middle-aged—out of her profession, what a fool she would feel! She balanced the paths and her judgment for a second, then decided in favor of the bargain. So Peter was left to the ministrations of Saunders.

That night the unexpected happened, unexpected as far as the sanitarium, the superintendent of nurses, and Sheila O’Leary were concerned. How unexpected it was to Peter depends largely on whether it was the result of a decision on his part to stop coaxing existence—or a desire to escape permanently from Saunders—or merely an accident. However, Sheila O’Leary was called in the middle of the night, when she was sleeping so soundly that it took the combined efforts of the superintendent and the head night nurse to shake her awake. As she hurried into her uniform they gave her the bare details. Somehow the doors of the sun-parlor had not been fastened as usual, and a patient had stayed up there after lights were out. He had tried to find his way to the lift, had slipped the fastenings of the door in his effort to locate the bell, and had fallen four stories, to the top of the lift itself. The whole accident was unbelievable, unprecedented. They might find some plausible explanation in the morning—but in the mean time the patient was in the operating-room and Sheila O’Leary was to report at once for night duty.

As the girl pinned on her cap the superintendent whispered the last instructions: “You’ll find him in Number Three, Surgical. It’s one of your fighting cases, Leerie, and it’s Doctor Dempsy’s patient. Remember, your best work this time, girl, for all our sakes!”

And it was a fighting case. Innumerable nights followed, all alike. The temperature rose and fell a little, only to rise again; the pulse strengthened and weakened by turns; delirium continued unbroken. As night after night wore on and no fresh sign of internal injury developed, the girl found herself forgetting the immediate condition of the patient and going back to the thing that had brought him here. If she was right and he was possessed by a fixed idea, the dread of some concrete thing or experience, his delirium showed no evidence. It seemed more the delirium of exhaustion than fever, and there was no raving. Consciousness, however, might reveal what delirium hid, so, as the nights slipped monotonously by, the girl found herself waiting with a growing eagerness for the man to come back to himself.

The waiting seemed interminable, but a time came at last when Sheila slipped through the door of No. 3 and found a pair of deep-set, haunting eyes turned full upon her.

“It’s—it’s Leerie.” The words