“May I speak with you privately a moment, doctor?” asked Dr. Price.

They withdrew from the room and were engaged in conversation for a few moments.  Dr. Burns finally yielded.

“I shall nevertheless feel humiliated when I meet Miller again,” he said, “but of course if there is a personal question involved, that alters the situation.  Had it been merely a matter of color, I should have maintained my position.  As things stand, I wash my hands of the whole affair, so far as Miller is concerned, like Pontius Pilate—­yes, indeed, sir, I feel very much like that individual.”

“I’ll explain the matter to Miller,” returned Dr. Price, amiably, “and make it all right with him.  We Southern people understand the negroes better than you do, sir.  Why should we not?  They have been constantly under our interested observation for several hundred years.  You feel this vastly more than Miller will.  He knows the feeling of the white people, and is accustomed to it.  He wishes to live and do business here, and is quite too shrewd to antagonize his neighbors or come where he is not wanted.  He is in fact too much of a gentleman to do so.”

“I shall leave the explanation to you entirely,” rejoined Dr. Burns, as they reentered the other room.

Carteret led the way to the nursery, where the operation was to take place.  Dr. Price lingered for a moment.  Miller was not likely to be behind the hour, if he came at all, and it would be well to head him off before the operation began.

Scarcely had the rest left the room when the doorbell sounded, and a servant announced Dr. Miller.

Dr. Price stepped into the hall and met Miller face to face.

He had meant to state the situation to Miller frankly, but now that the moment had come he wavered.  He was a fine physician, but he shrank from strenuous responsibilities.  It had been easy to theorize about the negro; it was more difficult to look this man in the eyes—­whom at this moment he felt to be as essentially a gentleman as himself—­and tell him the humiliating truth.

As a physician his method was to ease pain—­he would rather take the risk of losing a patient from the use of an anaesthetic than from the shock of an operation.  He liked Miller, wished him well, and would not wittingly wound his feelings.  He really thought him too much of a gentleman for the town, in view of the restrictions with which he must inevitably be hampered.  There was something melancholy, to a cultivated mind, about a sensitive, educated man who happened to be off color.  Such a person was a sort of social misfit, an odd quantity, educated out of his own class, with no possible hope of entrance into that above it.  He felt quite sure that if he had been in Miller’s place, he would never have settled in the South—­he would have moved to Europe, or to the West Indies, or some Central or South American state where questions of color were not regarded as vitally important.