“I come prepared to pay,” said the man.  He straightened his shoulders and flushed.

“Oh, well,” said Doctor Gordon, “wait.  If you need more medicine, or it seems necessary that I should drive over to see your wife, you can do a little work on my garden in the spring, or you can let me have a bushel of your new potatoes when they are grown next summer, or some apples, and we’ll call it square.  Wait; I don’t want any money for that bottle of medicine to-night anyhow.  Did you walk over, Joe?”

Joe said that he had walked over.  “Aaron might just as well drive you home as not,” said Gordon.  “The sooner your wife has that medicine the better.  How is the baby getting along?”

“First-rate.  I’d just as soon walk, doctor.”

For answer Gordon opened the door and called Aaron, and told him to hitch up and take the man home.

“Doctor Elliot has gone with the bay,” said Aaron.  “The teams are about played out, and there’s nothin’ except the gray.”

“Take her then.”

“She looked when I fed her jest now as if she was half a mind to balk at takin’ her feed,” Aaron remarked doubtfully.

“Nonsense!  Give her a loose rein, and she’ll be all right.”

Aaron went out grumbling.

Gordon offered the man a cigar, which he accepted as if it had been a diamond.  “I’ll save it up for next Sunday, when I’ve got a little time to sense it,” he said.  “I know what your cigars be.”

Gordon forced another upon him, and the man looked as pleased as a child.

Presently a shout was heard, and Gordon opened the office door.

“Here’s Aaron with the buggy,” he said.

He stood in the doorway watching, but the gray, instead of balking, went out of the yard with an angry plunge.  Gordon shook his head.

“Confound him, he’s pulling too hard on the lines,” he muttered.  Then he closed and locked the office door, and went into the living-room to find it deserted.  Gordon called up the stairs.  “Have you gone to bed, Clara?” His voice was at once tenderly solicitous and angry.

Mrs. Ewing answered him from above, and in her tone was something propitiating.  “Yes, Tom, dear,” she called.

Gordon hesitated a moment.  His face took on its expression of utmost misery.  “Is—­the pain very bad?” he called then, and called as if he were in actual fear.

“No, dear,” the woman’s patient, beseeching voice answered, “not very bad.”

“Not very?”

“No, only I felt a little twinge, and thought I had better go to bed.  I am quite comfortable now.  I think I shall go to sleep.  I am sorry to leave you alone all the evening, Tom.”