“She tries pitifully hard to remember, and is so sweet and brave we are all devoted to her.  I always stop and talk to her when I go by her.  She seems to cling to me, rather, as if I could help her get things back.  Lord knows I wish I could.  She is too dainty and fragile a morsel of humanity to be left to fight such a thing alone.  She is a regular little Dresden shepherdess, with the tiniest feet and hands and the yellowest hair and bluest eyes I ever saw.  Her husband must be about crazy, poor chap, not hearing from her.  I suppose he will be turning up soon to claim her.  I hope so.  I don’t know what will become of her if he does not.

“It is late and I must turn in.  I don’t know when I shall get home.  I don’t flatter myself Dunbury will miss me much when it has you.  Give everybody my love and tell Tony I am awfully sorry I couldn’t get to commencement.  I guess maybe she is glad enough to have me alive not to mind much.  I’m some glad to be alive myself.”

The letter ended with affectionate greetings to the older doctor from his nephew and junior assistant.  With it came another epistle from the same city from an old doctor friend who had watched Philip Holiday, himself, grow up, and had immediately set his eye on the younger Holiday, when he had discovered the relationship.

“You have a lad to be proud of in that Larry of yours,” he wrote.  “He is on the job early and late, no smart Alecness, no shirking, no fool questions, just there on the spot when you want him with cool head, steady nerves and a hand as gentle as a woman’s.  I like his quality, Phil.  Quality shows up at a time like this.  He is true Holiday, through and through, and you can tell him I said so when you see him.”

The doctor smiled, well pleased at this tribute to Ned’s son and this letter, like Larry’s, he handed to his wife Margery to read.

The thirties had touched “Miss Margery” lightly.  She was still slim and girlish-looking.  In her simple gown of that forgetmenot blue shade which her husband particularly loved she seemed scarcely older than she had on that day, some eight years earlier, when he had found her giving a Fourth of July party to the Hill youngsters, and had begun to lose his heart to her then and there.  It was not by shedding care and responsibility, however, that she had kept her youth.  It was by no means the easiest thing in the world to be a busy doctor’s wife, the mother of two lively children and faithful daughter to an invalid and rather “difficult” mother-in-law, as well as to care for a big house and an elastic household, which in vacation time included Ned Holiday’s children and their friends.  Needless to say she did not do any painting these days.  But there is more than one way of being an artist, and of the art of simple, lovely, human living Margery Holiday was past mistress.

“Doesn’t sound much like ‘Lazy Larry’ these days, does it?” she commented, giving the letters back to her husband.  “I know you are proud of Doctor Fenton’s letter, Phil.  You ought to be.  It is more than a little due to you that Larry is what he is.”