Hiram dressed, seated himself.  By chance he was opposite a huge image from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic sagacity.  As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself.  When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—­the man and the “familiar” were so ghastly alike.  Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician’s—­his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions of Saint X.

“There!” said Schulze, looking up.  “That’s the best I can do for you.”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“You wouldn’t know if I told you.”

“Is it serious?”

“In this world everything is serious—­and nothing.”

“Will I die?”

Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram’s outward signs of majesty that had been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and nose and chin—­an ensemble of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal.

“Yes,” he answered, with satiric bitterness; “you will have to die, and rot, just like the rest of us.”

“Tell me!” Hiram commanded.  “Will I die soon?”

Schulze reflected, rubbing his red-button nose with his stubby fingers. 
When he spoke, his voice had a sad gentleness.  “You can bear hearing it. 
You have the right to know.”  He leaned back, paused, said in a low tone: 
“Put your house in order, Mr. Ranger.”

Hiram’s steadfast gray eyes met bravely the eyes of the man who had just read him his death warrant.  A long pause; then Hiram said “Thank you,” in his quiet, calm way.

He took the prescriptions, went out into the street.  It looked strange to him; he felt like a stranger in that town where he had spent half a century—­felt like a temporary tenant of that vast, strong body of his which until now had seemed himself.  And he—­or was it the stranger within him?—­kept repeating:  “Put your house in order.  Put your house in order.”

CHAPTER II

OF SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES

At the second turning Arthur rounded the tandem out of Jefferson Street into Willow with a skill that delighted both him and his sister.  “But why go that way?” said she.  “Why not through Monroe street?  I’m sure the horses would behave.”

“Better not risk it,” replied Arthur, showing that he, too, had had, but had rejected, the temptation to parade the crowded part of town.  “Even if the horses didn’t act up, the people might, they’re such jays.”

Adelaide’s estimate of what she and her brother had acquired in the East was as high as was his, and she had the same unflattering opinion of those who lacked it.  But it ruffled her to hear him call the home folks jays—­just as it would have ruffled him had she been the one to make the slighting remark.  “If you invite people’s opinion,” said she, “you’ve no right to sneer at them because they don’t say what you wanted.”