“Well!” he said rather testily.  “That is too bad.”

“I know you’ll be glad not to have me bothering you any more with my lessons, and all.”

“I will not say that.”

He looked at Fifi closely, examined her face in a searching, personal manner, which he had probably never before employed in reviewing a human countenance.

“You don’t look well—­no, not in the least.  You are not well.  You are a sick girl, and you ought to be in bed at this moment.”

Fifi colored with pleasure.  “No,” she said, “I am not well.”

Indeed Fifi was not well.  Her cheek spoke of the three pounds she had lost since he had first helped her with her difficulties, and the eleven pounds before that.  The hand upon the Turkey-red cloth was of such transparent thinness that you were sure you could see the lamplight shining through.  Her eyes were startling, they were so full of other-worldly sweetness and so ringed beneath with shadows.

“And if I stopped coming down here to work nights,” queried Fifi shamelessly, “would you—­miss me?”

“Miss you?”

“You wouldn’t—­you wouldn’t!  You’d only be glad not to have me around—­”

“I can truthfully say,” said the little Doctor, glancing at his watch, “that I am sorry you are prevented from graduating.”

Fifi retired in a fit of coughing.  She and her cough had played fast and loose with Queed’s great work that evening, and, moreover, it took him a minute and a half to get her out of his mind after she had gone.  Not long afterwards, he discovered that the yellow sheet he wrote upon was the last of his pad.  That meant that he must count out time to go upstairs and get another one.

Count out time!  Why, that was what his whole life had come down to now!  What was it but a steady counting out of ever more and more time?

The thirty days of hours ceded to Klinker were up, and instead of at once bringing the prodigal experiment to a close, Doctor Queed found himself terribly tempted to listen to his trainer’s entreaties and extend by fifty per centum the time allotted to the gymnasium and open-air pedestrianism.  He could not avoid the knowledge that he felt decidedly better since he had begun the exercises, especially during these last few days.  For a week “the” headache and he had been strangers.  Much more important, he was conscious of bringing to his work, not indeed a livelier interest, for that would have been impossible, but an increasing vitality and an enlarged capacity.  He kept the most careful sort of tabs upon himself, and his records seemed to show, at least for the past week or two, that his net volume of work had not been seriously lowered by the hour per day wrung from the Schedule.  The exercises, then, seemed to be paying their own freight.  And besides all this, they were clearly little mile-stones on the path which led men to physical competency and the ability to protect their articles from public affront.