"Good Lord!" ejaculated the doctor. "What an infernal pity! What's his name?"
"Hugh Stires."
"Stires?" the other repeated. "Stires? How odd!" He stood a moment, tapping his suit-case with his stick. Suddenly he took the lawyer's arm and led him into the side-path.
"Come," he said, "I want to show you something."
He led the way quickly to the Knob, where he stopped, as much astonished as his companion, for he had known nothing of the statue. They read the words chiselled on its base. "The prodigal son," said Felder.
"Now look at the name on the headstone," said the physician.
Felder's glance lifted from the stone, to peer through the screening bushes to the cabin on the shelf below, and returned to the other's face with quick comprehension. "You think—"
"Who could doubt it? I will arise and go unto my father. The old man's whim to be buried here had a meaning, after all. The statue is Miss Holme's work—nobody in Smoky Mountain could do it—and I've seen her modelling in clay at the sanatorium. What we saw just now is the key to what might have been a pretty riddle if we had ever looked further than our noses. It's a case of a clever rascal and damnable propinquity. The ward has fallen in love with the black sheep!"
They betook themselves down the mountain in silence, the doctor wondering how deep a hurt lay back of that instant's color on his friend's now imperturbable face, and more than disturbed on Jessica's account. Her care for the cross-grained, likable invalid had touched him.