"As soon as you have had breakfast, Downs, I wish you would come over. Mrs. Ousley is not very well. She would like to see you."
Then he added with affectionate seriousness: "I have told her about you: how we have known each other all our lives, have played together, hunted together, slept together, travelled together, studied together. She knows all about you! I have prepared the way for you to be her physician. There was a great difficulty there—that question of her physician: you will know that, when you know her!"
A new look had come into his eyes: he stood as on the peak of experience—the true mountain-top of the life of this world.
"I will come at once."
Young Ousley, with a sudden impulse, perhaps to conceal his own sacred emotion, rode over to a window of the breakfast room and peered in at the waiting table with its solitary chair at the head. He raised his voice as though speaking to an imaginary person inside:
"How do you do, Mrs. Birney?" he said. "Could I speak to the doctor a moment? I should like to have his private ear professionally: could you pass one of his ears out?"
The doctor stooped and scraped together a snowball from the edge of the porch, and with a soft toss hit him in the face:—
"Take that for speaking to Mrs. Birney through a window! And Mrs. Birney is not my office boy. And I do the passing out of my own ears—to any desired distance."
The young husband rode back to the porch, wiping the snow out of his laughing eyes: they looked blue as with the clear laughter of the sky.
"That will never do!" he said with a backward motion of his head toward the solitary chair at the breakfast-table. "What right have you to defraud a girl out of all that happiness?"