The two shook hands, gripping tightly and looking straight into each other's eyes.
"Thank you, Red, for it all," said Gardner Coolidge. "There have been minutes when I felt differently, but I understand you better now. And I see why your waiting room is full of patients even on a stormy day."
"No, you don't," denied Red Pepper Burns stoutly. "If you saw me take their heads off you'd wonder that they ever came again. Plenty of them don't—and I don't blame them—when I've cooled off."
Coolidge smiled. "You never lie awake thinking over what you've said or done, do you, Red? Bygones are bygones with a man like you. You couldn't do your work if they weren't!"
A peculiar look leaped into Burns's eyes. "That's what the outsiders always think," he answered briefly.
"Isn't it true?"
"You may as well go on thinking it is—and so may the rest. What's the use of explaining oneself, or trying to? Better to go on looking unsympathetic—and suffering, sometimes, more than all one's patients put together!"
Coolidge stared at the other man. His face showed suddenly certain grim lines which Coolidge had not noticed there before—lines written by endurance, nothing less. But even as the patient looked the physician's expression changed again. His sternly set lips relaxed into a smile, he pointed to a motioning porter.
"Time to be off, Cooly," he said. "Mind you let me know how—you are. Good luck—the best of it!"