The house-party had grown a little larger than was originally intended.  On Saturday night we sat down twelve to dinner.  Doctor Jones and I shared a room together, and I must say whatever misgivings I might have had about him wore away very quickly on closer acquaintance.  In the first place he looked well in evening dress, carrying himself with a sort of shy, kind air that became him immensely.  At table he developed the greatest of conversational gifts—­that of the appreciative and intelligent listener.  I heard one of the guests asking Eleanor who was that charming young man.  Freddy and I hugged each other (I mean metaphorically, of course) and gloried in his success.  In the presence of an admirer (such is the mystery of women) Eleanor instantly got fifteen points better looking, and you wouldn’t have known her for the same girl.  Freddy thought it was the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gown she wore, but I could see it was deeper than that.  She was thawing in the sunshine of love, and I’ll do Doctor Jones the justice to say that he didn’t hide his affection under a bushel.  It was generous enough for everybody to bask in, and in his pell-mell ardor he took us all to his bosom.  The women loved him for it, and entered into a tacit conspiracy to gain him the right-of-way to wherever Eleanor was to be found.  In fact, he followed her about like a dog, and she could scarcely move without stepping on him.

Sunday was even better.  One of the housemaids drank some wood alcohol by mistake for vichy water, and the resulting uproar redounded to Jones’ coolness, skill and despatch.  He dominated the situation and—­well, I won’t describe it, this not being a medical work, and the reader probably being a good guesser.  Mrs. Matthewman remarked significantly that it must be nice to be the wife of a medical man—­one would always have the safe feeling of a doctor at hand in case anything happened at night!  Eleanor said it was a beautiful profession that had for its object the alleviation of human pain.  Freddy. jealously tried to get in a good word for boxers, but nobody would listen to her except me.  It was all Jones, Jones, Jones, and the triumphs of modern medicine.  Altogether he sailed through that whole day with flying colors, first with the housemaid, and then afterward at church, where he was the only one that knew what Sunday after Epiphany it was.  He made it plainer than ever that he was a model young man and a pattern.  Mrs. Matthewman compared him to her departed husband, and talked about old-fashioned courtesy and the splendid men of her youth.  Everybody fell over everybody else to praise him.  It was a regular Jones boom.  People began to write down his address, and ask him if he’d be free Thursday, or what about Friday, and started to book seats in advance.

That evening, as I was washing my hands before dinner and cheerfully whistling Hiawatha, I became conscious that Jones was lolling back on a sofa at the dark end of the room.  What particularly arrested my attention was a groan—­a hollow, reverberatory groan—­preceded by a pack of heartrending sighs.  It worried me—­when everything seemed to be going so well.  He had every right to be whistling Hiawatha, too.