That relapse passed, but no one could say what a day might bring forth.  The young doctor looked back over the past; he bowed beneath the burden that he felt upon him.  However, due credit must be given to his friend Samuel O’Neill for assisting him to bring his sober meditations to a focus.

In these days O’Neill, having got his stiff factory law drafted, was becoming concerned with the problem of landing it on the statute-books.  The complexion of the incoming legislature, which met in January, promised to be conservative; and the Commissioner, breathing threatenings and slaughter against the waist-coated interests which had so flouted his warnings last winter, had decided that a preliminary press campaign would be needed—­beginning, say, November 1st—­to arouse public opinion to the needs of reform.  The lively “Chronicle,” the “labor paper,” offered space for a series of contributed articles from the Commission office, always provided that “hot stuff” only was furnished, by which was meant vigorous, if not libelous, assaults upon the existing order.

Now it became the earnest wish of Commissioner O’Neill that these hot-stuff articles should be written for him by his friend V.V., of the reformatory passions and the pen of a ready writer.  And, the whole subject having been discussed several times in an indecisive sort of way, O’Neill one night whacked out a jagged argument.

“I had ’em going eight months ago—­was starting out for Heth’s with an axe—­and you asked me to leave ’em to you.  I thought you had something—­an idea....  Say, V.V., suppose we’d gone and out bagged ’em then, like I wanted—­would your friend Corinne be lyin’ at death’s door now?”

There was, indeed, nothing precisely original in this inquiry; but, put by another, and in so bald a form, it undoubtedly came upon a man somewhat stark and hard.  The two men stood talking on a street corner, where they had met by chance, and their conversation here came to an end.  V.V.’s reply to Sam’s question was indefinite, to say the least of it.  He merely observed that he must be getting on back to the office; adding that he didn’t like to be absent for any length of time just now.  But he didn’t say at all, by that annoying habit of reserve he had, whether or not he would agree to write the articles!  That was what Samuel O’Neill wanted to know....

It was September now, the third night.  At his office the doctor found two calls for him, noted on a scrap of brown wrapping-paper in the rudimentary hand of Mrs. Garland.  He went out again, disappearing over the Hill into that quarter of the town which was less cheering than honest slums.  Returning, about ten, he found the Dabney House entirely silent:  all quiet from the direction of the sick-room.  All quiet, too, in the tall bare office.  Very quiet, indeed....

It was a strange-looking room to be a doctor’s office; on the whole a strange-looking young man to be a doctor; no stereotyped thoughts, it may be, pounding through the head he held so fast between his hands.  Strange entanglements were here, too, with the brilliant life over the Gulf:  a life whose visible thread, it is easily surmised, will hardly lead us by this ancient secretary again.