As for the face resting against the chair back, it was flushed after a fashion which suggested illness rather than health, and Miss Mathewson realized presently that the respiration of the sleeper was not quite what it should be.  Whether this were due to fatigue or coming illness she could not tell.

Half-past one!  The first early caller was slowing a small motor at the curb outside when Amy Mathewson gently touched the girl’s arm.  “Come into the other room, please,” she said.

The brown eyes opened languidly.  The black-gloved hand clutched at the handbag, and the girl rose.  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured.  “I don’t know how I came to go to sleep.”

“You were tired out.  If I had known I should have brought you in here before,” Amy said, leading her into the consulting room.  “It is still half an hour before Doctor Burns will be in, and you must lie here on his couch while you wait.”

“Oh, thank you, but I ought not to go to sleep.  I—­have you just a minute to spare?  I should like to show you a little book I am selling—­”

Miss Mathewson suffered a sudden revulsion of feeling.  So this girl was only a book agent.  First on the list of what by two o’clock would be a good-sized assemblage of waiting patients, she must not be allowed to take Doctor Burns’s time to exploit her wares.  Yet, even as Amy regretted having brought a book agent into this inner sanctum, the girl looked up from searching in her handbag and seemed to recognize the prejudice she had excited.

“Oh, but I’m a patient, too,” she said with a little smile.  “I didn’t expect to take the Doctor’s time telling him about the book.  But you—­I thought you might be interested.  It’s a little book of bedtime stories for children.  They are very jolly little tales.  Would you care to see it?”

Now Amy Mathewson was the fortunate or unfortunate—­as you happen to regard such things—­possessor of a particularly warm heart, and the result of this appeal was that she took the book away with her into the outer office, promising to look it over if the seller of it would lie down upon the couch and rest quietly.  She was convinced that the girl was much more than weary—­she was very far from well.  The revealing light of that consulting room had struck upon the upturned face and had shown Miss Mathewson’s trained eyes certain signs which alarmed her.

So it came about that Red Pepper Burns, coming in ruddy from his twelve-mile dash home, and feeling particularly fit for the labours of the afternoon in consequence of having found every hospital patient of his own on the road to recovery—­two of them having taken a right-about-face from a condition which the day before had pointed toward trouble—­discovered his first office patient lying fast asleep upon the consulting room couch.

“She seemed so worn out I put her here,” explained Miss Mathewson, standing beside him.  “She falls asleep the moment she is off her feet.”