After five minutes of perfunctory examination and courteous attention to symptoms, he tore himself away from his patient upon the pretext that she needed quiet.  He wasted three more golden minutes in assuring his fellow passengers that it was nothing.  He escaped to the dining car, to find that the delay had favored him.  Her honey-colored back hair gleamed from one of the narrow tables to left of the aisle.  The unconsidered man opposite her had just laid a bill on the waiter’s check, and dipped his hands in the fingerbowl.  Dr. Blake invented a short colloquy with the conductor and slipped up just as the waiter returned with the change.  He bent over the girl.

“I have to report,” said he, “that the patient is doing nicely; doctor and nurse are both discharged!”

She returned a grave smile and answered conventionally, “I am very glad.”

At that precise moment, the man across the table, as though recognizing friendship or familiarity between these two, pocketed his change and rose.  Feeling that he was doing the thing awkwardly, that he would give a year for a light word to cover up his boldness, Dr. Blake took the seat.  He looked slowly up as he settled himself, and he could feel the heat of a blush on his temples.  He perceived—­and for a moment it did not reassure him—­that she on her part neither blushed nor bristled.  Her skin kept its transparent whiteness, and her eyes looked into his with intent gravity.  Indeed, he felt through her whole attitude the perfect frankness of good breeding—­a frankness which discouraged familiarity while accepting with human simplicity an accidental contact of the highway.  She was the better gentleman of the two.  His renewed confusion set him to talking fast.

“If it weren’t that you failed to come in with any superfluous advice, I should say that you had been a nurse—­you seem to have the instinct.  You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss.”

“Why should I?” she asked, “with a doctor at hand?  I was thinking all the time how you lean on a doctor.  I should never have known what to do.  How is she?  What was the matter?”

“She’s resting.  It isn’t every elderly lady who can get a compartment from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat.  She was put on at Albany by one set of grandchildren and she’s to be taken off at Boston by another set.  And she’s old and her heart’s a little sluggish—­self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the generations, I observe—­though I’m a young physician at that!”

Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into confusion.

“I don’t know your name, I think—­mine is Annette Markham.”

Dr. Blake drew out a card.

“Dr. W.H.  Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of Occupation,” he supplemented, “now looking for a practice in these United States!”

“The Philippines—­oh, you’ve been in the East?  When we were in the Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly—­I didn’t think we’d all be talking of them so soon—­”