dow they could see the Colonel moving about the laboratory and could see the Professor bending over his table. When the Colonel came in answer to her call the gaunt, shaggy old man, with just the faintest shuffle in his military tread and the shadow of a slouch in his bearing, smiled at the pair in the living-room and joked his old joke: Well, how're Pelléas and Mélisande this evening?"

She handed him the circular without a word and pointed to it, saying: "You must help! Oh, Father, you must, you must help!"

As the old man fumbled for his glasses he said: "Well, I'm glad to help. I was helping Gregory. in there with that electrical experiment. The transformer doesn't work some way, but he says he'll get it down." The Colonel finally got on his glasses. The two stood watching him. He had not fixed his eyes on the sheet half a minute before he began: "What in hell is -" Then a

few seconds later: "Well, Go-"

But a horrible blue-green glare in the window. and a crashing sound scattered the group, and they

went running to the laboratory. It could not have been ten seconds from the time they saw the glare that the Colonel had shut off the current, and in the darkness they stumbled over the body of the Professor. The smell of scorching clothing was in the air and the little tongues of flame were lapping about the legs of a stool. While her father and the Doctor were stamping out the flames and chattering orders at each other, Mrs. Nixon accepted the challenge of death. She bent over the limp figure against which she had stumbled in the dark. She lifted it without a gasp, carried it into the living-room and put it on a couch. Under her command the Colonel was drawing water from a faucet in the laboratory and the Doctor was at his medicine case, and the woman, losing no second by a false motion or a clumsy finger, was tearing away the clothing from about the Professor's neck. She worked his arms and did not speak or look round as she bent to her task. She was unconscious of the Doctor at the table, but as the seconds assembled into a minute she realised that he was fluttering and fumbling with his medicines.

The Colonel's hands were pouring water upon

the ashen face, and his old legs were hurrying him to and fro from the laboratory with slopping beakers. She kept murmuring "Hurry!" over and over as she worked. Finally, at another half minute's end she turned quickly and saw the fumbling hands of the Doctor the steel fingers fatuously wiggling, crazy and out of control. When she had turned back to her work her mind recorded to her consciousness that the fine forehead of the Doctor and his upper lip were beady with sweat. At that moment she did not see the devil shriving the Doctor's soul. For so desperately was she wrestling with death that she did not translate the meaning of the Doctor's visage, nor read the warning in his mad hands. She was breathing into her husband's lungs from her own lungs deep drafts of air; but when death and the devil came up behind her, as the Doctor moved, she glanced for a moment into his face, saw the bestial glint in his eyes, and saw a bestial slant to his slinking shoulders and swaying body and half rose to cry:

"Paul!"

The Doctor tried to answer, but his voice had slipped from its control. She repeated: What's that? What's that?" looking at the medicine in

his hand. A whisper came sputtering out of the cruel animal mouth; she did not heed it. For their eyes met, and in the silence she understood him. With one free hand she knocked the medicine from the unsteady fingers. Half rising, she crouched over the body as if to shield it, and cried to her father: Telephone for Doctor Roberts and Doctor Keller quick!" Then, when her command had started her father to the telephone, she whispered to the Doctor: "Hide that medicine case. The other doctors must not think -"

Then she lost consciousness of the Doctor, and with no more tremor than a machine she held to her fight with death. Something back of her consciousness was directing that fight, something strong, capable, precise, indomitable.

The Doctor reached to touch the limp hand nearest to him, but from her distraught eyes a look sent him back ashamed. In that look she saw that the beast had left him. She saw his calm, professional face, gray and worn and haggard. "Come here and work - work!" she cried as she heard wheels scraping the gravel of the driveway and knew another doctor had arrived.

It was ten o'clock. Mrs. Nixon was talking to the Globe office and Elsie Barnes was at the other end of the wire. Mrs. Nixon was speaking clearly and so that the Doctor in the next room and the maids might hear: "You may say for me, in tomorrow's paper, that this accident naturally will keep me from my work on the Law and Order Committee until after the election, and that I have been compelled to resign from the chairmanship. You understand, Elsie?" Then the Colonel, standing by his daughter, heard her say: "Now, Elsie, call me up any time to-night if anything goes

wrong.

The old man was wet-eyed and broken, not the strong old man he had been when he came laughing out of the laboratory less than two hours before. The voices of the trio of doctors in the sick room could be heard; but they were not excited voices. One laughed; another was trying to make the patient laugh. Doctor Kurtlin was evidently at the head of the stairs, coming down.

"Little girl, little girl!" cried the unsteady old voice. “I'm an old man, an old man, and they've cracked my old bones and they've put water in