“Trust a woman to confront a man with the unthinkable, and then expect him to take credit for not having been guilty of it!  Would I have snatched a juicy bone away from a starving lion?  That’s what Leaver has been all these months.  It’s what any man gets to be when his job is taken away from him and he doesn’t know when he will get another.  No—­at the same time that I’m envious I’m genuinely happy that the lion got his bone.  He needed it.  It’s going to make a well lion of him; he is one now.  You’re glad, too, aren’t you?”

He gave her one of his quick, discerning glances.

“Of course I am.”  She spoke quite heartily enough to satisfy him.

“Good!  Then, if I can wheedle him before the camera, you’ll be interested in making a picture of him that Ellen and I shall want to frame and look at every day?”

“I will give you my amateur’s best, certainly, Dr. Burns.”

“Prunes and prisms!” he exclaimed, and broke into a laugh.  “I didn’t expect that, from a girl like you.  I should have expected you to—­well, never mind.  I was on the verge of being impertinent, I’m afraid.  Forgive me, will you, for what I might have said?  I’ll bring him over at the first opportunity.”

CHAPTER XIV

BEFORE THE LENS

“Red, this is certainly the unkindest cut of all!  I haven’t minded your other prescriptions, but to insist on giving a well man the worst dose of his experience to take—­”

“Stuff and nonsense!  A bad prescription—­to go across the street and let the prettiest photographer in the United States take a sun picture of you before you leave town?  Besides, you owe it to us.  I haven’t the smallest kind of a likeness of you.  I want a nice big one, to use in my advertisements.  I only wish I had a picture of you ‘as you were,’ to put beside the ‘as you are.’  It would be telling.  ’The great Burns’s greatest cure.  The celebrated Leaver of Baltimore as he was when Burns finished with him.’  I’ll send you a dozen copies of the paper.”

“Please, Dr. Leaver.”  Mrs. Red Pepper Burns added her plea.  “Red really wants it very much, and so do I. You admit you have no photograph to send us, and we know quite well you won’t go and have one made by Mr. Brant, as you should.  So please let Miss Ruston try her art.  We think you owe it to us.”

Leaver looked at her, and his determined lips relaxed into a smile.  “I admit that argument tells, Mrs. Burns,” he said.  “I suppose it is ungracious of me, but, to tell the truth, I’ve always preferred to be able to say I had no portraits of myself.”

“Oh, I see,” Burns broke in.  “We’re not considering, Ellen, the urgent demands for a popular bachelor surgeon’s photograph.  It’s precisely like Jack not to hand them out to the ladies, or to the newspaper men.  All right, old chap.  Give us what we want and we’ll have the plate smashed.  Now will you be good?  Come, let’s go over.  If you really mean to leave to-night this is our last chance.”