"Well, Maria?" He took her hand warmly, but there was an anxious question in his tone.
"Here he is, Doctor." She showed him into the room where Dr. Barnhelm was standing waiting to greet him.
The two men clasped hands warmly. Dr. Barnhelm was greatly affected, but knowing how gladly his friend had made any sacrifice that had been necessary to hurry to him, he tried to say as little as possible.
"It is all wrong, Paul. You should not have left your work."
"La! I needed a change; the sea air has made me young again. Now--you?"
"So? You do not look it." He turned gravely to Maria. "You have done well. He needed me."
"Yes, sir." She was content. She knew now how great a liberty she had taken, but he had told her that she had done well, and she was happy. She smiled at him through her tears as she turned to go, but his voice stopped her.
She took a small package from him, and opening it, stood open-mouthed before a pretty little necklace of French beads.
"Oh, Doctor! Oh! I never saw nothing so grand!"
"You are a good girl, Maria, and this Mr. Barnes is a lucky man."
"Thank you, sir," and she went quietly out of the room, leaving the two men together.
"Now, Martin!" He turned to Dr. Barnhelm gravely. "Let us have it out." He seated himself beside him and looked him squarely in the face. "You do not try to live? Eh?"
"When I left you, you had not tried to know. Have you seen her?"
"I wrote her," answered Dr. Barnhelm slowly, "that I was coming back here to live, and that if she ever needed a roof to shelter her, that she--she could come."
"And in that letter," Dr. Crossett went on relentlessly, "did you say, 'You are my daughter; I love you'?"
"What else have I done for six months, but think?"
"Very well." Dr. Crossett gave up in despair. "We will say no more about it. You are a sick man, mind and body; that is all that we must think of now. Do you practice?"
"And that?" Dr. Crossett pointed to the machine on the table. "What have you done with that?"
"And yet you told me once that it was the thing you prayed for."
"I was a fool!" Dr. Barnhelm spoke with a bitterness that until long afterwards his friend could not understand. "I thought myself something of a philosopher, and yet I did not know that there is no curse so bitter as the curse of a granted prayer. It is always so; a young man prays for fame, and when it comes he finds that it is an empty word. Another prays for money, and when his prayer is granted he finds that his happiness is gone. The woman prays for love; it comes, and she finds the bitterness of it. The mother prays for the life of her child, and the child grows up and breaks her heart."