"Ask the Archangel Gabriel, Miss Baird."
"Miss Baird?" Like a woman her train of thought switched up a siding.
Jerce coloured all over his large waxen face, and he gulped with embarrassment. "Of course, I have known you since you were a little girl," he began, awkwardly, "but----"
She cut him short. "Then why not call me Clarice?"
"Only too delighted," he stuttered. "Clarice, then."
"Clarice now, I rather think," she laughed, and, wondering at the confusion of this usually self-contained physician, returned forthwith to the topic which had created this conversation. "What can be the matter with Uncle Henry?" she said again.
Jerce became the medical man at once, and shook his head. "Ten years of attendance on Horran have left me where I was at the beginning."
"How strange."
"Everything connected with medicine is strange. The human body is a box of tricks, with which we play, in the dark."
"A box of bricks, you mean."