Martin’s face beamed and then he went on: 

“That was a big day for me, Doris, but even when the chap went into it, I kept quiet.  I feared he might balk.  But he hasn’t!  He’s big stuff—­that boy of mine.  He confided everything to me this time.  Certain phases of the work almost drove him off—­dissecting and, well, the grimmer aspects!  Often, he told me, he had to put up a stiff fight with himself before he could enter a dissecting room—­but that does one of two things, Doris:  makes a doctor human or a brute.  It has humanized Bud.  He’ll be through now, in a year or so, and I’m going to throw him neck and crop into my practice.  I’ll stand by for awhile, but I have great faith in my boy!”

Doris looked up at the grave, happy face above her own.

For a moment a sensation she had never experienced before touched her—­it was like jealousy!

“How he would have adored a son of his own,” she thought, “and what a father he would have been!”

She faltered before speaking, then she said quietly: 

“If—­if I have deprived you of much, David, at least I have not killed the soul of you.”

“I’m learning as I go along, my dear,” Martin replied.

“We’re not all developed in the same way.”

“And, David,” Doris trembled as she spoke, “as you feel for your boy, so I feel for my Joan.  You must trust me.”

“That is different,” Martin stiffened.

“It is the same.”

CHAPTER XII

“In all directions gulfs and yawning abysses.”

That was what David Martin felt was encompassing Joan.  He wanted to take a hand in her affairs, but before he left Ridge House Doris made him promise that unless she changed her mind, he would not even call upon Joan.

“If she knows that you have your eye on her, David, much of what I hope for will be threatened.  You have quite a dreadful eye, dear man, and Joan is sensitive.  She may look you up—­I will write to her about you.  If she doesn’t, she does not want you to—­well, Davey, meddle!  And she has a perfect right to her freedom.  She is self-supporting now!”

Doris could but show her pride in Joan’s cleverness.

“Very well, Doris.  I wash my hands of the matter, but I think it sheer madness!”

With that Martin returned to town and waited, hopefully, for a summons from Joan.  It did not come!

He did go so far, one evening, as to walk on the block where the studio was, but he got no satisfaction from that except the proof of its respectability.

“I cannot look back just now!” Joan had thought when considering Martin, “and Uncle David would tell me things about Aunt Dorrie and Nancy that would rumple all my calm, and I dare not risk it.”

In this she was wise—­for there were times when, the novelty and freedom of self-support worn off, the temptation to return to the waiting flesh-pots was very great.  At such moments of weakness Patricia rallied her.