across her turbid eyes. "Now you count ten, Doctor," she murmured quite casually. "And when you say ten I'll tell you the wish."

"This isn't a game, Mrs. Gallien!" bristled the Young Doctor.

Very languidly the woman opened her eyes wide.

"Oh, isn't it?" she asked. "Then I won't wish, thank you."

"What are you talking about?" scolded the Young Doctor.

"About getting well," conceded the woman. Languidly the white eyelids closed again. "And if getting well isn't a game—I won't get well, either," affirmed the woman.

With a gasp of irritation the Young Doctor snatched up his hat and left the room.

But outside the door, neither up the hall nor down the hall, nor across the hall, was the nurse waiting where he had told her to wait. 8

9

"Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go ahead! One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—TEN!"

10

With an audible imprecation he stalked back into the sick- room and threw himself down into the first chair he could reach.

"Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go ahead! One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten!"

As automatically almost as a mechanical doll the Sick Woman opened her eyes.

"Oh, all right!" she smiled. "Now I will tell you the wish. But first I must tell you that the thing I hate most in the world is an empty twilight. And the thing I love best is a crowded shop. Oh, the joy of shopping!" she quickened. "The fun, the fury of it! Buy, buy, buy, while the light lasts and the money shines! But as for the empty twilight?" she wilted again. "I wish—" her voice caught suddenly, "I wish that the last mail of the day may never leave me utterly letterless. And that I may always be expecting a package by express!"

"Do you really mean it?" asked the Young 11Doctor without the slightest trace of perturbance.

"Why, of course I mean it!" smiled the woman. "But do you dream for a moment that you can guarantee that?"

"I can at least prescribe it," said the Young Doctor.

"You have more subtlety than I thought," drawled the woman.

"You have more simplicity than I had dared to hope," bowed the Young Doctor.

Again, in shrewd half-mocking appraisement, the two measured each other.

Then with a great, busy frown the Young Doctor turned to his notebook.

"Let me see," he estimated. "It was four weeks ago yesterday— that you fell on the street."

"Was it?" said the woman indifferently.

"Mrs. Gallien," asked the Young Doctor with some abruptness, "just exactly where is your home?"

"I have no home," said the woman.

"Yes, but you must live somewhere," bristled the Young Doctor.

"Only in my pocketbook and my sense of 12humor," quoted the woman with frank mockery.

"But why make such a mystery about your domicile?" persisted the Young Doctor.

"That's just it," said the woman. "I haven't any domicile to make a mystery of! It's seventeen years since I've lived in what you call a domicile.

"Where have you lived?" demanded the Young Doctor.

"Oh, on steamers mostly," conceded the woman. Very faintly the pallid nostrils dilated. "I've been to Australia five times," she acknowledged. "And China twice. And Japan,—" she quickened. "All the little vague outlying islands, all the great jostling eager seaports! By steam, by paddle wheels, by lax, loose-flapping rainbow-colored sails!" In sudden listlessness she turned her cheek to the pillow again. "Wherever the sea is salt," she murmured. "Wherever the sea is salt! Hunting, always and forever hunting,—yes, that's it,—always and forever hunting for lights and laughter and——"

"Pardon me," said the Young Doctor, quite abruptly. "But is your husband living?" 13

"No," said the woman. "He died two years ago."

Inquisitively for a moment the Young Doctor studied the nerve-ravaged face before him.

"Pardon me," he stammered. "But—but was it a great shock to you?"

"It was a great relief," said the woman, without emotion. "He had been hopelessly insane for seventeen years."

"Oh!" jumped the Young Doctor, as though the thought fairly tortured his senses.

"Oh!" speculated the woman quizzically, with the merciful outer callousness which the brain provides for those who are obliged to carry some one scorching thought for an indeterminate period of years.

As though in sheer nervous outlet the Young Doctor began almost at once to pace the room.

"Seeing that there are no—no personal ties, apparently, to hold you here—or drive you there," he said, "the matter of congenial climate ought to be one that we can easily arrange." 14

With half ironic amusement the Sick Woman lay and watched his worried, fluctuating face.

"The question of climate is all arranged!" she said. "The speed that was stripped from my body last week, has at least been put back into my brain. Just where I am going, just whom I am going to take with me, just what I am going to do to amuse me, every last infinitesimal detail of all the rest of my life," she smiled, "I have planned it all out while you have been dawdling there between the wardrobe and the bureau."

"Dawdling?" snapped the Young Doctor. Quite abruptly he stopped his nervous pacing. "Well, where is it that you want to go?" he asked.

Musingly the woman's eyes stared off again into the window- framed vista of the city roofs.

"On an island," she said. "Off the coast of South Carolina there is a house. It is really rather a dreadful old place. I have not seen it since I was a girl. It was old then. It must be almost a wreck now. And the island is not very large. And there is no other house on the island. Just this great rambling deserted shack. And six battered old live-oak trees half strangled with dangly gray moss. And there are blue jays always in the gray 15moss, and cardinal birds, and unestimable squirrels. And there is a bedroom in the house forty feet long. And in that bedroom there is a four-poster seven feet wide, and most weirdly devised of old ships' figureheads, a smirking, faded siren at one corner, a broken-nosed sailor at another,—I forget the others—but altogether in memory I see it as a rather unusually broad and amusing shelf to be laid aside on. And there, in the middle of that great ship-figured bed, in the middle of that great dingy sunken-cabin sort of room with its every ancient windowpane blearing grayly into the sea, through deck-like porches so broad, so dark, so glowering that no streak of cloud or sky will ever reach my eyes again, nor any strip of gray-brown earth—I shall lie, I say, in unutterable peace and tranquillity as other ghosts have lain before me, 'forty fathoms deep' below all their troubles. And always as I lie thus, there will be the sigh of the surf in my ears. And the swell of the tide in my eyes. Eternally across my windows fin-like wings shall soar and pass and gray mosses float and flare."

"Cheerful!" snapped the Young Doctor. 16

"Yes. Isn't it?" beamed the woman.

With a gasp of surprise the Young Doctor turned and stared at her.

"Why, I really believe that you think so!" he stammered.

"Why, of course I think so!" said the Woman. "Why not?" she queried. "A dimming candle glows brightest in a dark room!" Not a trace of