"I'm cold. I've been cold all day. But never mind that, Mr. Brotherson. Tell me how to begin my letter."

" This way. 'I've not been able to answer your kind letter, because I have had to play nurse for some three or four weeks to a very fretful and exacting patient.' Have you written that?"

" No," said Doris, bending over her desk till her curls fell in a tangle over her white cheeks. " I do not like to," she protested at last, with an attempt at naivete which seemed real enough to him.

" Well, leave out the fretful if you must, but keep in the exacting. I have been exacting, you know."

Silence, broken only by the scratching of the stubborn, illy-directed pen.

"It's down," she whispered. She said, afterward, that it was like writing with a ghost looking over one's shoulder.

"Then add, 'Mr. Brotherson has had a slight attack of fever, but he is getting well fast, and will soon -, Do I run on too quickly?"

"But not without losing breath; eh, Doris?"