He sighed, at last, and turned to Mrs. Ladue. "I should like to live there," he said.
"You would find it rather a hardship, I am afraid," she returned, watching him closely, "depending upon that well, picturesque as it is."
He laughed. "Easy enough to lay pipes from the hotel, back there." He nodded in the direction of the larger house, the one of the twenty-five Guernseys and the model barn. "They have a large supply and a power pump. Ask me something harder."
"The heating," she ventured. "Fires—open fires—are very nice and necessary. But they wouldn't be sufficient."
He laughed again. "It is not impossible to put in a heating-system. One might even run steam pipes along with the water pipes and heat from their boilers. I press the button, they do the rest."
"Well, I can't seem to think of any other objection. And there is a very good view."
"A very good view," he repeated. He was silent for a while. "I have done very well in the past five or six years," he said then, "and the wish that has been growing—my dearest wish, if you like—has been to establish a sort of private hospital about here somewhere. It wouldn't be a hospital, exactly; anyway, my patients might not like the word. And I should hate to call it a sanitarium. Call it Sanderson's Retreat." He smiled at the words. "That's it. We'll call it Sanderson's Retreat."
It would have warmed his heart if he could have seen her face; but he was not looking.
"I am very glad, Fox," she murmured. "That makes me very happy."
"Sanderson's Retreat?" he asked, turning to her. "But I haven't got it. Just as I thought I had found it I found that I couldn't get it."