The specialist who came from Winnipeg diagnosed her case as chronic anaemia and prescribed port wine, which she refused with a queer little wavering cry and a sudden rush of tears.  But she put up a good fight nevertheless.  She wanted to live so much, for the sake of Mary, her beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.

Mrs. Barner did not live to see the whole work of degeneration, for the end came in the early spring, swift and sudden and kind.

The doctor’s grief for his wife was sincere.  He always referred to her as “my poor Mildred,” and never spoke of her except when comparatively sober.

Mary Barner took up the burden of caring for her father without question, for she loved him with a great and pitying love, to which he responded in his best moments.  In the winter she went with him on his drives night and day, for the fear of what might happen was always in her heart.  She was his housekeeper, his office-girl, his bookkeeper; she endured all things, loneliness, poverty, disgrace, without complaining or bitterness.

One day shortly after Mrs. Barner’s death big John Robertson from “the hills” drove furiously down the street to the doctor’s house, and rushed into the office without ringing the bell.  His little boy had been cut with the mower-knives, and he implored the doctor to come at once.

The doctor sat at his desk, just drunk enough to be ugly-tempered, and curtly told Mr. Robertson to go straight to perdition, and as the poor man, wild with excitement, begged him to come and offered him money, he yawned nonchalantly, and with some slight variations repeated the injunction.

Mary hearing the conversation came in hurriedly.

“Mary, my dear,” the doctor said, “please leave us.  This gentleman is quite forgetting himself and his language is shocking.”  Mary did not even look at her father.  She was packing his little satchel with all that would be needed.

“Now pick him up and take him,” she said firmly to big John.  “He’ll be all right when he sees your little boy, never mind what he says now.”

Big John seized the doctor and bore him struggling and protesting to the wagon.

The doctor made an effort to get out.

“Put him down in the bottom with this under his head”—­handing Big John a cushion—­“and put your feet on him,” Mary commanded.

Big John did as she bid him, none too gently, for he could still hear his little boy’s cries and see that cruel jagged wound.

“Oh, don’t hurt him,” she cried piteously, and ran sobbing into the house.  Upstairs, in what had been her mother’s room, she pressed her face against her mother’s kimono that still hung behind the door.  “I am not crying for you to come back, mother,” she sobbed bitterly, “I am just crying for your little girl.”

The doctor was asleep when John reached his little shanty in the hills.  The child still lived, his Highland mother having stopped the blood with rude bandaging and ashes, a remedy learned in her far-off island home.