The dog sat up and begged for more sugar, and James, when they all left the table, coolly took a handful of sugar from the bowl and carried it into the office, the dog leaping at his side.  Emma slammed the dining-room door behind him.  Clemency, without a look at him, immediately ran upstairs to her own room.  Gordon and James sat down in the office as usual for a smoke until James should start upon his afternoon rounds.  Gordon asked him a few questions about the patients whom he had seen that morning, but in a listless, abstracted fashion, then he spoke of those whom James would see that afternoon.  “You had better take the team,” he said.

“Clemency is going with me,” James said.

Gordon looked at him with faint surprise.  “I think you must be mistaken,” he said.  “Clemency came to me just before luncheon and asked if I had any objections to her spending a few days with Annie Lipton.  I told her we could get on perfectly well without her, and Aaron is going to drive her over.  She will have to take a suit-case.  I knew you had to go in another direction, and could not take her.  I thought the change would do her good.  Didn’t she say anything to you about it?”

“I think it will do her good.  She needs a little change,” James replied evasively.  As he spoke Aaron came out of the stable leading the bay mare harnessed to a buggy.

“She is going right away,” said Gordon, looking a little puzzled.  He had hardly finished speaking before Clemency’s voice was heard in the hall.  It rang rather hard, but quite clearly.  “Good-by,” she called out.

“Good-by,” responded Gordon and James together.  Gordon looked at James, astonished that he did not go out to assist Clemency into the buggy, and bid her good-by.  He seemed about to question him, then he took another puff at his pipe, and his face settled into its wonted expression of gloomy retrospection.  Boy’s and girl’s love affairs seemed as motes in a beam of sunlight to him at this juncture.

James started to go, the horses were stamping uneasily in the drive, and he had a long round of calls to make that afternoon.

Gordon removed his pipe.  “I am putting a good deal on you, Elliot,” he said with a kind of hard sadness.

“That’s all right,” James replied cheerfully, “I am strong.  I can stand it if the patients can.  I fancied old Mrs. Steen was rather disgusted to see me this morning.  I heard her say something about sendin’ a boy to her daughter, and when I went into the bedroom, she glared at me, and said, ‘You?’” James laughed.

“Her case is not at all desperate,” Gordon said gloomily.  “She is merely on the downward road of life.  Nothing ails her except that.  You can supply the few inadequate crutches of tonics as well as any one.  There is not one desperately sick patient on the whole list now, that I know of, although I must confess that that Willoughby girl rather puzzles me.  She breaks every diagnosis all to pieces.”