He finished writing at last with a sigh of relief, and folding the letter, together with one addressed to Evadne, he enclosed both in a large envelope which he sealed and addressed to Judge Hildreth, Marlborough, Mass.  Then he leaned back in his chair, and, clasping his hands behind his head, looked fixedly at the picture of his fair young wife which hung above his desk.

“A bad job well done, Louise—­or a good one.  Our little lass isn’t very well adapted to making her way among strangers, and the Bohemianism of this life is a poor preparation for the heavy respectability of a New England existence.  Lawrence is a good fellow, but that wife of his always put me in mind of iced champagne, sparkling and cold.”  He sighed heavily, “Poor little Vad!  It is a dreary outlook, but it seems my one resource.  Lawrence is the only relative I have in the world.

“After all, I may be fighting windmills, and years hence may laugh at this morning’s work as an example of the folly of yielding to unnecessary alarm.  Danvers is getting childish.  All physicians get to be old fogies, I fancy, a natural sequence to a life spent in hunting down germs I suppose.  They grow to imagine them where none exist.”

He rose, and strolled out on the veranda.  As he did so, a negro, whose snow-white hair had earned for him from his master the sobriquet of Methusaleh, came towards the broad front steps.  He was a grotesque image as he stood doffing a large palm-leaf hat, and Lenox Hildreth felt an irresistible inclination to laugh, and laughed accordingly.  His morning’s occupation had been one of the rare instances in which he had run counter to his inclinations.  Sky blue cotton trousers showed two brown ankles before his feet hid themselves in a pair of clumsy shoes; a scarlet shirt, ornamented with large brass buttons and fastened at the throat with a cotton handkerchief of vivid corn color, was surmounted by an old nankeen coat, upon whose gaping elbows a careful wife had sewn patches of green cloth; his hands were encased in white cotton gloves three sizes too large, whose finger tips waved in the wind as their wearer flourished his palm-leaf headgear in deprecating obeisance.

“Well, Methusaleh, where are you off to now?” and Lenox Hildreth leaned against a flower wreathed pillar in lazy amusement.

“To camp-meetin’, Mass Hildreff.  I hez your permission, sah?” and the negro rolled his eyes with a ludicrous expression of humility.

His master laughed with the easy indulgence which made his servants impose upon him.

“You seem to have taken it, you rascal.  It is rather late in the day to ask for permission when you and your store clothes are all ready for a start.”

“’Scuse me, Mass Hildreff,” with another deprecating wave of the palm-leaf hat, “but yer see I knowed yer wouldn’t dissapint me of de priv’lege uv goin’ ter camp-meetin’ nohow.”

Lenox Hildreth held his cigar between his slender fingers and watched the tiny wreaths of smoke as they circled about his head.