“And I shall make ready to stay a long time?” Firio insinuated softly.

“No!” Jack answered to space.

The pyramid of mail might have been a week’s batch for the Doge himself.  At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge’s list.  There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile’s intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a blank receipt to be filled in.  He tore off the wrappers of the magazines as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him.  His aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment.

When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, “Come in!” but, contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt was well masked.

There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for negligee business suits for that spring.  To the simple interior of a western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as a thing ineradicably bred into his being.  It was evident, too, that he had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow physicians, or the members of the patient’s family.  But this time that was lacking.  The young man leaning against the table was not visibly impressed.

“Hello, doctor!” said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the time of day with Jim Galway in the street.

“Hello, Jack!” said the doctor.

Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands.  Then he dropped back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a chair for the visitor.

“How do you like Little Rivers?” Jack asked.

“I have been here only thirty-six hours,” answered the doctor, avoiding a direct answer.  He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much attention.  “I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his mole patch saved me.  I didn’t think you could have grown one out here.  Wonderfully like you!  Have you met him?”

He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the business in hand.

“No.  I have just heard of him,” Jack answered.

The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his pocket.  Don’t the lecturers to young medical students say, “Divert your patient’s mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first impression”?  Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of mankind.  With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side coat-pocket.