“I wonder just what would happen there if Parker lost his money to-morrow—­if Aunt Frothy died and left it all to Magsie Clay?” Rachael suggested, smiling.

The doctor answered only with a shrug.

“More than that,” pursued Rachael, “suppose that Parker woke up to-morrow morning and found his engagement was all a dream, found that he really hadn’t asked Leila to marry him, and that he was as free as air.  Do you suppose that the minute he’d had his breakfast he would go straight over to Leila’s house and make his dream a heavenly reality?  Or would he decide that there was no hurry about it, and that he might as well rather keep away from the Buckney house until he’d made up his mind?”

“I suppose he might convince himself that an hour or two’s delay wouldn’t matter!” said the doctor, laughing.

“If you talk to me of clothes, or of jewelry, or of what one ought to send a bride, and what to say in a letter of condolence, I know where I am,” said Rachael, “but love, I freely confess, is something else again!”

“I suppose my mother has known great love,” said the man, after a pause.  “She spends her days in that quiet old house dreaming about my father, and my brothers, looking at their pictures, and reading their letters—­”

“But, Greg, she’s so unhappy!” Rachael objected briskly.  “And love—­surely the contention is that love ought to make one happy?”

“Well, I think her memories do make her happy, in a way.  Although my mother is really too conscientious a woman to be happy, she worries about events that are dead issues these twenty years.  She wonders if my brother George might have been saved if she had noticed his cough before she did; there was a child who died at birth, and then there are all the memories of my father’s death—­ the time he wanted ice water and the doctors forbade it, and he looked at her reproachfully.  Poor Mother!”

“You’re a joy to her anyway, Greg,” Rachael said, as he paused.

“Charley is,” he conceded thoughtfully, “and in a way I know I am!  But not in every way, of course,” Warren Gregory smiled a little ruefully.

“So the case for love is far from proved,” Rachael summarized cheerfully.  “There’s no such thing!”

“On the contrary, there isn’t anything else, really, in the world,” smiled the man.  “I’ve seen it shining here and there; we get away from it here, somewhat, I’ll admit”—­his glance and gesture indicated the other occupants of the room—­“and, like you, I don’t quite know where we miss it, and what it’s all about, but there have been cases in our wards, for instance:  girls whose husbands have been brought in all smashed up—­”

“Girls who saw themselves worried about rent and bread and butter!” suggested Rachael in delicate irony.

“No, I don’t think so.  And mothers—­mothers hanging over sick children—­”

The women nodded quickly.