As she passed out of the hall, her eyes fell again upon the painting of the Temptation. She read the black and gilt legend below it—“And Angels Came and Ministered Unto Him.” Then she laughed down upon the old-fashioned figure trotting by her side. “And angels came,” she said.
Her rapt look frightened Anna when the automobile returned for her. Then the heart of that frivolous woman was stricken for a moment with wistfulness.
“You seem very happy,” she faltered, “and—amused, is it? What are you smiling over?”
“I am still thinking of angels. Would you ever have dreamed, Anna, that they sometimes wore list shoes, and sometimes ate bread and jam, and occasionally spoke with granite lips? They do.”
Brockton stirred uneasily, foreboding failure. And Anna sighed, mourning two lost visions.
KEEPERS OF A CHARGE
BY GRACE ELLERY CHANNING
The Doctor’s brougham stood at the door; the Doctor’s liveried servants waited at the foot of the stairs; the Doctor himself in his study was gathering together his paraphernalia for the day, and the Doctor’s face was a study.
He was tired; he was cross; he was feeling ill. His nervous hands were unsteady; his movements were by jerks; his face was a knitted tangle of lines. He had rheumatism in both shoulders, and a headache, and a pain in his chest. He had slept but little, and one of his patients had had the happy idea of despatching a messenger for him in the dead hour of the night. The Doctor never went out nights, and she ought to have known this, but her only son was ill and she was persuaded he could not survive a dozen hours together without the Doctor’s personal attendance.
It never seemed to occur to any of his patients that his own life was of the smallest consequence in the balance with theirs or that of any member of their families. Occasionally, when his rheumatism was exceptionally severe or his cough racking, this reflection embittered the Doctor. At other times—and this was generally—he accepted with philosophy this integral selfishness of clients as a part of their inevitable constitution. They were a set of people necessarily immersed and absorbed in their own woes, or in that extension of their woes which was still more passionately their own, and even more unmercifully insisted upon in proportion to the decent veneer of altruism it possessed.