“Red,” he said bye and bye, when the two were alone together for a few minutes again in the consulting room before he should leave for his train, “is that all the prescription you’re going to give me—­a trip to California?  Suppose I’m not successful?”

Red Pepper Burns smiled, a curious little smile.  “You’ve forgotten what I told you about the way my old man and woman made a home together,’ and worked at their market gardening together, and read and studied together—­did everything from first to last together.  That’s the whole force of the illustration, to my mind, Cooly.  It’s the standing shoulder to shoulder to face life that does the thing.  Whatever plan you make for your after life, when you bring Alicia back with you—­as you will; I know it—­make it a plan which means partnership—­if you have to build a cottage down on the edge of your estate and live alone there together.  Alone till the children come to keep you company,” he added with a sudden flashing smile.

Coolidge looked at him and shook his head.  His face dropped back into melancholy.  He opened his lips and closed them again.  Red Pepper Burns opened his own lips—­and closed them again.  When he did speak it was to say, more gently than he had yet spoken: 

“Old fellow, life isn’t in ruins before you.  Make up your mind to that.  You’ll sleep again, and laugh again—­and cry again, too,—­because life is like that, and you wouldn’t want it any other way.”

It was time for Coolidge to go, and the two men went in to permit the guest to take leave of Mrs. Burns.  When they left the house Coolidge told his friend briefly what he thought of his friend’s wife, and Burns smiled in the darkness as he heard.

“She affects most people that way,” he answered with a proud little ring in his voice.  But he did not go on to talk about her; that would have been brutal indeed in Coolidge’s unhappy circumstances.

At the train Coolidge turned suddenly to his physician.  “You haven’t given me anything for my sleeplessness,” he said.

“Think you must have a prescription?” Burns inquired, getting out his blank and pen.

“It will take some time for your advice to work out, if it ever does,” Coolidge said.  “Meanwhile, the more good sleep I get the fitter I shall be for the effort.”

“True enough.  All right, you shall have the prescription.”

Burns wrote rapidly, resting the small leather-bound book on his knee, his foot on an iron rail of the fence which kept passengers from crowding.  He read over what he had written, his face sober, his eyes intent.  He scrawled a nearly indecipherable “Burns” at the bottom, folded the slip and handed it to his friend.  “Put it away till you’re ready to get it filled,” he advised.

The two shook hands, gripping tightly and looking straight into each other’s eyes.

“Thank you, Red, for it all,” said Gardner Coolidge.  “There have been minutes when I felt differently, but I understand you better now.  And I see why your waiting room is full of patients even on a stormy day.”