DEAR Idiot: I knew you would get it--and you got it. Perhaps after this you will learn to treat your sciatic nerve with proper respect. But there is a worse complaint than sciatica. It lasts longer. Certain symptoms of it are indicated in the things which your letter leaves unsaid. Beans, old thing, you alarm me.

Now here is a sporting offer. If you'll drop it and come home at once I'll promise never to tell Aunt Caroline. Come the moment you can put foot to the ground. And, until then, I recommend strict seclusion and no nursing. Nursing might well be fatal. Stick to Li Ho. He is your only chance.

Your Aunt Caroline sends her love. (I told her I was writing you directions for further treatment). She feels the deprivation of your letters keenly. She can't see why the writing of a nice, chatty letter to one's only living Aunt should prove an undue drain upon nervous energy. Life has taught her not to expect consideration from relatives, but it does seem hard that her only sister's boy should treat her as if she were the scarlet fever. To allow himself to be ordered away from home for a rest cure was certainly less than courteous. To anyone not understanding the situation it would almost imply that his home was not restful. And after all the trouble she had taken even to the extent of strained relations with those Macfarland people who own a rooster. If the slight had been aimed entirely at herself she could have taken it silently, but when it included the three or four charming girls whom she had asked to visit (one at a time) for the purpose of providing pleasant company, she felt obliged to protest. Although protest, she knew, was useless. All this, however, she could have borne. The thing that she could scarcely forgive was the slight offered to his native town by a departure three days before the set date, thereby turning his "going away" tea into a "gone away"--an action considered by all (invited) Bainbridge as a personal insult.

Pause here for breath.

To continue. Your Aunt Caroline does not believe in rest cures anyway.

She thinks poultices are much more effective. It stands to reason that if a thing is in, it ought to come out. Rest cures are just laziness.

But, thank goodness, she never expected anything from the Spence family but laziness. And she had told her sister so before she married into it....

Allow an hour here for ancestral history with appropriate comment and another hour for a brief review of your own conduct from youth up and we come within measurable distance of a few words by me. I took up the point of the four or five nice girls who had been invited to visit. I put the whole thing down to shock and pointed out that patience is required. A return to physical normality, I said, would doubtless bring with it a reviving interest in the s.e.x. It was indeed very fortunate, I told her, that you were, at present, indifferent. Any question of selecting a life partner in your present nervous state would be most dangerous. Your power of judgment, I pointed out, was temporarily jarred and out of gear. You might marry anybody. The only safe, the only humane way, was to give you time to recover yourself.

"Power of judgment!" said Aunt Caroline. "Do you mean to tell me that my sister's son is in danger of becoming an idiot?"

I said not exactly an idiot. Yet your strong disinclination toward marriage could certainly be traced to a shocked condition of the nerves. Certain fixed ideas--

"Fixed ideas!" said your Aunt. She has a particularly annoying habit of repeating one's words. "Benis has always had fixed ideas--though when he was young," she added with satisfaction, "I knew how to unfix them.

If this absurd rest cure can do anything to cure chronic stubbornness, I've nothing to say. Why, even his father was easier to manage."

"Benis," I said, "considers himself very like his father."

"Does he?" retorted your dear Aunt with withering scorn. "He is just as much like his father as a lemon is like a lobster."

This ended our conversation. But the effect of it is still with me.

Last night I dreamed of lemons and today I prescribed lobster for a man with acute dyspepsia. I tell you what, you old shirker, it's up to you to come home and bear your own Aunt. I'm through. Bones.

P.S. The office nurse has been changed since you left. I have now Miss Watkins, returned from overseas. I think you knew her--name of Mary?

Very good looking--almost her only fault.

P.P.S. What you say about your pleasant old gentle-man with the umbrella sounds very much like masked epilepsy. Ought to be under treatment. I should say dangerous.

S.O.S. Aunt Caroline has just 'phoned to know whether all letter-writing is barred or if not, wouldn't it be helpful if you were to drop a line to a few of your young-friends? For herself she expects nothing, but she does think, etc., etc., etc.!

Come back! B.

CHAPTER XII

Comprising a lengthy letter from, Benis Spence to John Rogers, M.D.

DEAR and Venerable Bones: Your fatherly letter came too late. What was going to happen has happened. But I will be honest and admit that its earlier arrival would have made no difference. Calm yourself with the thought that our fates are written upon our foreheads. I have been able to read mine for some little time now. For there are some things which are impossible and leaving Desire here was one of them.

I call her "Desire" to you because it is what you will be calling her soon. Strange, how that small fact seems to place her' Fancy my marrying someone whom you would naturally call "Mrs. Spence"? There are such people. All Aunt Caroline's young friends are like that. You would say, "I have looked forward to meeting you, Mrs. Spence," and she would giggle and say, "Oh, Dr. Rogers, I have heard my husband speak of you so often!" But Desire will say, "So this is John." And then she will look at you with that detached yet interested look and you will find yourself saying "Desire" before you think of it. You see, she belongs.

But before I bring you up to date with regard to recent events, I had better tell you a few facts about my more remote past. I refer to Mary.

I have already told you that I found a past necessary. At that time I hoped that something fairly abstract would do. But Desire does not like abstractions. She likes to "know where she is." So I had to tell her about Mary. I'll tell you, too, before I forget details and for heaven's sake get them right! You never can tell when your knowledge may be needed. In the first place there is the name. I'm rather proud of that. I had to choose it at a moment's notice and I did not hesitate. Desire herself says it is a lovely name. And so safe--amn't I right in the impression that every second girl in Bainbridge and elsewhere is called Mary? Mary, my Mary, might be anybody.

Here, then, are the main facts. I have had (pre-war) a serious attachment. It was an affection tragically misplaced. She did not love me. She loved another. She may, or may not, have married him. (It would have been better to have had the marriage certain, but I didn't see it in time.) I will never care for another woman. Her name was Mary.

Please tabulate this romance where you can put your hand on it. I may need your help at any time. As a doctor your aid would be invaluable should it become necessary for Mary to decease.

And now to leave romance for reality. Your long and lucid discourse on masked epilepsy was most helpful. It was almost as informing as Li Ho's diagnosis of "moon-devil." Both have the merit of leaving the inquirer with an open mind. However--let's get on. If you have had my later letters you will know that circ.u.mstances indicated an elopement. But the more I thought of eloping, the more I disliked the idea. My father was not a man who would have eloped. And, in spite of Aunt Caroline's lobsters and lemons, I am very like my father. "That I have stolen away this old man's daughter--" Somehow it seemed very Oth.e.l.loish. I decided to simply tell Dr. Farr, calmly and reasonably, that Desire and I had decided to marry. I did tell him. I was calm and reasonable. But he wasn't.

There is a bit of sound tactics which says, "Never let the enemy surprise you." But how is one to keep him from doing it if he insists?

The surer you are that the enemy is going to do a certain thing, the more surprised you are when he doesn't. Now I felt sure that when Dr.

Farr heard the news he would have a fit. I expected him to use language and even his umbrella. But nothing of this kind happened. He simply sat there like a slightly faded and vague old gentleman and said "So?"--just like that.

I a.s.sured him, as delicately as possible that it was so.

Then, without warning, he began to weep. John, it was horrible! I can't describe it. You would have to see his blurred old face and depthless eyes before you could understand. Tears are healthy, normal things.

They were never meant for faces like his. I must have said something, in a kind of horror, for he got up suddenly and trotted off into the woods, without as much as a whisper.

It looked like an easy victory. But I knew it wasn't. I admit that I felt rather sorry we had not eloped. Li Ho made me still sorrier.

"Not much good, you make honorable Boss cly," said Li Ho. "Gettie mad heap better."

I felt that, as usual, Li Ho was right. And, just here, let me interpose that I am quite sure Li Ho can speak perfectly good English if he wishes. He certainly understands it. I have tried to puzzle him often by measured and academic speech and never yet has he missed the faintest shade of meaning. So I did not waste time with Pigeon English.

I told him the facts briefly.

"Me no likee," said Li Ho.

"You don't have to," said I.

Li Ho explained that it was not the contemplated marriage which received his disapproval but the circ.u.mstances surrounding it. "Me muchy glad Missy get mallied," said he. "Ladies so do, velly nice! When you depart to go?"

"Tomorrow," I said. Since we had given up the elopement it seemed more dignified to wait and depart by daylight.

Li Ho shook his head.

"You no wait tomolla," said he, "You go tonight. You go click."

"We can't go too quickly to suit me," I said. "It is for Miss Desire to decide."

"Me tell Missy," he said and hurried away.

Somehow, Li Ho always knows where to find Desire. She vanishes from my ken often, but never from his. He must have found her quickly this time for she came at once. She looked troubled.

"Li Ho says we had better go tonight," she said.

"Can you be ready?"

"Yes. It isn't that. It's just that it would seem more--more sensible by daylight. But Li Ho says you have told father, and that father was--upset. He said something about tonight being the full moon. But I can't see why that should matter. Do you?"

"Only that it will be easy to cross the Inlet."

"It can't be that. Li Ho can take the Tillic.u.m' over on the darkest night. It has something to do with father. He seems to think that the full moon affects him. And it's true that he often goes off on the mountain about that time. But I can't see why that should hurry us."