“But I do want to buy one,” he protested.  “I’ve a lot of nieces and nephews always coming at me for stories.”

She shook her head.  “You can’t buy one.  I’d like to give you one if you would take it, to show you how I appreciate this beautiful drive.”

“Of course I’ll take it,” he said quickly, “and delighted at the chance.”  He slipped the book into his pocket.  “As for the drive, it’s much jollier not to be covering the ground alone.  I wish, though—­” and he stopped, feeling that he was probably going to say the wrong thing.

She seemed to know what it would have been.  “You’re sorry to be taking me to the hospital?” she suggested.  “You needn’t be.  I didn’t want to go, just at first, but then—­I felt I could trust the Doctor.  He was so kind, and his hair was so like mine, he seemed like a sort of big older brother.”

“Red Pepper Burns seems like that to a lot of people, including myself.  I don’t look like much of a candidate for illness, but I’ve had an accident or two, and he’s pulled me through in great shape.  You’re right in trusting him and you can keep right on, to the last ditch—­” He stopped short again, with an inward thrust at himself for being so blundering in his suggestions to this girl, who, for all he knew, might be on her way to that “last ditch” from which not even Burns could save her.

But the girl herself seemed to have paused at his first phrase.  “What did you call the Doctor?” she asked, turning her eyes upon him again.

“What did I—­oh!  ‘Red Pepper.’  Yes—­I’ve no business to call him that, of course, and I don’t to his face, though his friends who are a bit older than I usually do, and people speak of him that way.  It’s his hair, of course—­and—­well, he has rather a quick temper.  People with that coloured hair—­But you’re wrong in saying yours is like his,” he added quickly.

For the first time he saw a smile touch her lips.  “So he has a quick temper,” she mused.  “I’m glad of that—­I have one myself.  It goes with the hair surely enough.”

“It goes with some other things,” ventured Jordan King, determined, if he made any more mistakes, to make them on the side of encouragement.  “Pluck, and endurance, and keeping jolly when you don’t feel so—­if you don’t mind my saying it.”

“One has to have a few of those things to start out into the world with,” said Miss Linton slowly, looking straight ahead again.

“One certainly does.  Doctor Burns understands that as well as any man I know.  And he likes to find those things in other people.”  Then with tales of some of the Doctor’s experiences which young King had heard he beguiled the way; and by the time he had told Miss Linton a story or two about certain experiences of his own in the Rockies, the car was approaching the city.  Presently they were drawing up before the group of wide-porched, long buildings, not unattractive in aspect, which formed the hospital known as the Good Samaritan.