Meanwhile, a lawyer, whose name sounded as though it had been culled from a Rhine Wine list, had begun suit, in Dr. Halding’s name, against the Mistress, as a “contributory cause” of his client’s accident.  The suit never came to trial.  It was dropped, indeed, with much haste.  Not from any change of heart on the plaintiff’s behalf; but because, at that juncture, Dr. Halding chanced to be arrested and interned as a dangerous Enemy Alien.  Our country had recently declared war on Germany; and the belated spy-hunt was up.

During the Federal officers’ search of the doctor’s house, for treasonable documents (of which they found an ample supply), they came upon his laboratory.  No fewer than five dogs, in varying stages of hideous torture, were found strapped to tables or hanging to wall-hooks.  The vivisector bewailed, loudly and gutturally, this cruel interruption to his researches in Science’s behalf.

One day, two months after the accident, Bruce stood on all four feet once more, with no vestige left of scars or of lameness.  And then, for the first time, a steady change that had been so slow as to escape any one’s notice dawned upon the Mistress and the Master.  It struck them both at the same moment.  And they stared dully at their pet.

The shapeless, bumptious, foolish Pest of two months ago had vanished.  In his place, by a very normal process of nature-magic, stood a magnificently stately thoroughbred collie.

The big head had tapered symmetrically, and had lost its puppy formlessness.  It was now a head worthy of Landseer’s own pencil.  The bonily awkward body had lengthened and had lost its myriad knobs and angles.  It had grown massively graceful.

The former thatch of half-curly and indeterminately yellowish fuzz had changed to a rough tawny coat, wavy and unbelievably heavy, stippled at the ends with glossy black.  There was a strange depth and repose and Soul in the dark eyes—­yes, and a keen intelligence, too.

It was the old story of the Ugly Duckling, all over again.

“Why!” gasped the Mistress.  “He’s—­he’s beautiful!  And I never knew it.”

At her loved voice the great dog moved across to where she sat.  Lightly he laid one little white paw on her knee and looked gravely up into her eyes.

“He’s got sense, too,” chimed in the Master.  “Look at those eyes, if you doubt it.  They’re alive with intelligence.  It’s—­it’s a miracle!  He can’t be the same worthless whelp I wanted to get rid of!  He can’t!”

And he was not.  The long illness, at the most formative time of the dog’s growth, had done its work in developing what, all the time, had lain latent.  The same illness—­and the long-enforced personal touch with humans—­had done an equally transforming work on the puppy’s undeveloped mind.  The Thackeray-Washington-Lincoln-Bismarck simile had held good.

What looked like a miracle was no more than the same beautifully simple process which Nature enacts every day, when she changes an awkward and dirt-colored cygnet into a glorious swan or a leggily gawky colt into a superb Derby-winner.  But Bruce’s metamorphosis seemed none the less wonderful in the eyes of the two people who had learned to love him.