But he had slipped beyond his slack control; he caught her in his arms and covered her golden head, her face, her lips, with kisses. At first he thought he had brought back the color to her lips. The frozen little figure melted against his heart; there was no resistance in her except a queer, muffled cry. He heard as he caught her to him a cry so low that he forced himself not to submit to its anguish. Then suddenly through the storm of his passion he met her eyes, and his heart failed him. There was no expression there at all. They looked straight at him like the empty eyes of a statue. Joy was not there; he had driven her far away.

He cried out in an agony of fear:

"Joy! Joy, my darling! Speak to me! Don't you know who I am? Don't you understand?"

But she made no answer. She was warm and alive, she had not even fainted; but she was not there. Her deep, unwavering eyes were like a curtain pulled down between him and her consciousness. She was in his arms, and yet he could not reach her.

Just as the room was shaken by the storm which could not enter, so his passion held and shook her, and stayed without the door of her shut soul. Without condemning him, without evading him, she had escaped.

For a few moments he continued to hold her in a frenzy of confused anxiety, but there was no return in her of consciousness. At last he could bear it no longer. He had a dreadful sense as if he had done something without excuse. He forgot his anger; all his feelings, even his great love, seemed like childish things. He realized only

up-stairs to Julia.

"Julia! Julia!" he gasped, "something happened to Joy, I don't know what! I kissed her and she 's-she's gone away!"

"Do you mean out of the house?" Julia cried with an anxious look into the rain-swept garden.

"Oh, no; worse! worse!" cried Owen. He kneeled down by the bedside and buried his head in the coverlet, as if to shut out sight.

"O Julia, her eyes! her eyes!" he moaned. "She's gone out of her mind! I did n't mean any harm; I swear I did n't mean to frighten her. I did n't know people could do things like that. I 've driven her out of it, as if I'd taken a whip! It's too horrible! For God's sake, do something! Do something, Julia!"

Julia put her hands quickly on his shoulders.

"There! there!" she said. "I can't stand, but bring her here, Owen. Of course she 'll get better, and it's almost as much my fault as yours. But she won't stay like that. Bring her here to me."

He looked up at Julia, the tears streaming down his cheeks. After all, nobody had ever taken such care of him as Julia.

"Julia," he gasped, "I 'm sorry; I'm sorry, Julia."

It was the first time she had ever seen him really blame himself. Instinctively, she drew his head against her heart.

"My dear! my dear!" she said, "we 've done a dreadful wrong! Go quickly and bring her to me."

Joy came quite willingly, hand in hand with him, like a child; but the terrible blankness of her eyes never

changed. It never changed again. For Joy had passed beyond that line, rigid and sane, which binds personality to the senses. She had been driven out, and she could not come into her earthly home again.

The twins were put into Joy's arms. She held them carefully, but she never looked at them. She did not hear words, but she never opposed the touch of a hand. Her body was as gentle and docile as her spirit had made it; only her spirit was no longer there.

The doctors did what they could. Owen sent for specialist after specialist. They only repeated one another a peculiar case of sudden nervous shock after a prolonged physical and mental strain. There was the illness and death of her little sister. Miss Featherstone had apparently not quite got over this before another shock superseded. They were very tactful. A few succinct words from Julia had given them the facts, and with "another shock superseded" they managed nicely. They all arrived at this conclusion, but none of them could get any further.

For a time Mrs. Featherstone took her home, but Mr. Featherstone could not bear it. He even became a little bitter about it, though he never wholly lost his faith. He simply said that Providence had been too hard upon him.

Joy herself seemed to feel a peculiar restlessness at home. She did not sleep, so they placed her finally in a beautifully kept asylum where she could have all the care and none of the anxiety of home.

It was some time before the doctors in the asylum realized that Joy could be a great help to them. Nobody ever continued to be violent in her presence. Directly Joy felt in the air the agony of a distraught mind,—and without

speech or sight she seemed to feel it,her whole being responded to it instantly. A peace, radiant and serene, soothing and strange, emanated from her. She seemed to draw out of the possessed the fury of their possession.

Owen visited her regularly at first. It was intensely painful to him, but for a long while he stood the pain of it, though he agreed with Julia that the Featherstones were greatly to blame for the whole wretched business: they should never have allowed Joy to nurse Rosemary. Then their life grew gradually comfortable again, and Owen ceased to be able to travel so far away from his business. If Joy had been conscious, he explained, he would have gone, and Julia agreed with him.

Julia had become very much softened. She agreed with Owen so often that he seldom wished for anybody else. He thought sometimes with a secret irony that if Julia had only been like this before, he might have been saved from his fatal inadvertence.

Only Mrs. Featherstone and Nicolas went regularly to see Joy. Nicolas never failed. He came once a month by himself, and sat with Joy for an hour. She never knew him, and when he went away he was neither sadder nor happier; he was merely unchanged.

The doctor talked to him quite freely about Joy's case, because he thought Nicolas was a distant and sensible relative whose affections were not involved; probably a trustee.

"Personally," he said, "I think Miss Featherstone's case is quite incurable. Perhaps another great shock might drag her back, or rather let her out, because some of her is actually there. I try to get at it with the violent cases, but I can't get any further. She's as safe as houses with them. I've taken

every precaution and tried every test, but though she deals with them directly, somehow it's not by any method of consciousness. Not what we mean by it, anyway. I should say she was possessed, only the other way round; not by the devil, as some of these poor creatures act as if they were, but well, it sounds a curious thing to say -by God. I often think to myself when I look at her, 'The pure in heart shall see God.""

Nicolas shook his head.

"She never did see any harm anywhere," he said. "I don't know about God; that's not my idea of Him.”

"No," agreed the doctor, "but is n't that what turns the savage cases quiet? Or if it is n't, what is? I've tried her over and over again with all the worst and most dangerous patients. She sits there saying nothing, with that light in her eyes, and they get quiet under it. They'd fly at me or a keeper, but she just walks straight up to them, and they don't turn a hair. They look at her as if she had cast a spell on them, and I've seen murder and vice die out under her eyes; and yet she can't hear a word you say, and I don't think she knows the difference between my hand and a blade of grass."

"She was always like that," said Nick, huskily, "with dangerous animals, as a little child. They did n't hurt her. It took a worse thing than an animal to hurt her."

The doctor coughed discreetly. He wanted to hear more about the case; he had always wanted to know more, but he heard no more from Nicolas.

After ten years the authorities sent for Nicolas.

"There is a change," the doctor explained. "She has got much thinner

lately, and she seems somehow-well, she was always contented, but somehow happier. You'll see for yourself. Her mother saw her yesterday and comes again to-morrow, but she does n't know any one yet."

Nick thought, when he came into Joy's room, that he had never seen any one look so much alive. She was sitting close by a large open window; the sun shone full on her golden head. There was very little of her left but life. It came through her small, eager hands and through her eyes in a torrent of happy expectancy. She sat there very still as usual, but as if she were waiting for something-something that she longed for, and which she knew would come.

Nick stood by her side for a long time in silence, they were alone together, then he said suddenly:

"Joy, Joy, are n't I unhappy enough yet for you to speak to me?"

She made no answer, but she moved her head restlessly as if she were listening to something that was a long way off. Nicolas kneeled down beside her and put his head in her lap. Instantly he felt the tender pressure of her hands, and, looking up at her, he saw her eyes change. They widened for a moment, and then they suddenly grew awake.

"Nick," she whispered, "my dear, don't trouble, don't be sad; there 's nothing left but love."

She held out her hands into the sunshine and laughed. Her eyes, tender and full of joy, left his, and rested on what they saw.

Nick sprang to his feet, and as she fell forward, he caught her against his heart.

She had never lived there, but it was there she died.

OME weeks ago the trustees of the
Johns Hopkins the trustal proved

themselves news-makers of the first order by the simple announcement of their opinion and local ruling that the maximum fee any surgeon should charge for an operation, no matter how wealthy the patient might be, is one thousand dollars, and that the maximum charge for attending patients in a hospital should be thirty-five dollars a week. This brief statement captured front-page space in virtually every newspaper in the United States and sent editorial pens everywhere to the ink-pots. There was a qualification, I believe, to the effect that this did not mean that a patient may never, in any circumstances, be charged more than these sums for medical attention or an operation, but that when more than these sums is charged, the hospital authorities must be informed of the circumstances and must approve the charge.

At the moment of writing only the more obvious aspects of the matter have been commented upon. I have gone carefully through a mass of newspaper comment upon this ruling, and these are the only questions I find discussed: Have surgeons been profiteering? Have they been charging all the

traffic will bear? If surgeons were prohibited from charging their wealthy

patients enormous fees, would they not be obliged to charge the average patient more than before? Would surgeons be able to do as much free work for the poor if they were prevented from securing high fees from patients who could afford to pay them? Would not the very wealthy be the only ones who would be benefited by such a scheme? Would not such a system of standardized fees destroy the surgeon's incentive to expertness by enabling the man of lesser ability to charge the same as his more expert colleague? Has an institution any right to dictate the fees that a surgeon, not in the whole-time employ of the institution, may ask for his service?

I have called these the more obvious aspects of the matter because I regard the single act of the limitation of surgeons' fees by the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a case of much ado about nothing, an incident that is important only as it may attract public attention to a much broader issue, the problem of an adequate and statesmanlike organization of the medical service of the nation. I want, however, before passing on to a discussion of this broader issue, to set down certain ob

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Have surgeons been profiteering, charging all the traffic would bear? Here and there individual surgeons have undoubtedly charged enormous fees that readily lend color to the profiteering charge, but, aside from the justice or injustice of such fees, it is safe to say that when more than the Johns Hopkins maximum of one thousand dollars has been charged, it has been asked of men and women upon whom its payment was not a hardship. The fees that exceed a thousand dollars do not, therefore, present a pressing social problem of wide concern. The real problem is not that of the few enormous fees, but of the general high cost of medical attention. This fact was clearly stated a few days ago in an unsigned article in "The New York Times," which began as follows:

The movement inaugurated at the Johns Hopkins Hospital to limit the fees which surgeons may charge for operations promises little relief to innumerable members of the great middle-class who are not financially able to go under the knife of the best surgeons in search of health. This class is all but barred from the benefits accruing from the rapid development of medical science, for the simple reason that they are not poor enough to accept charity and yet are not wealthy enough to meet the rising costs of proper medical treatment.

The fact is now generally admitted by leading surgeons and medical men. Here there is growing talk of the necessity for a sort of clearing house where a patient

may go to have the nature of his complaint determined, avail himself of treatment, and finally pay one bill for the services rendered. As it is, he must go

medical channels where tolls must be paid to the X-ray man, pathologist, surgeon, anæsthetist, trained nurse, and

perhaps many others, exclusive of hospi

tal board, before he emerges into the class of a bankrupt.

This matter of the general high cost of medical attention is of greater social significance than isolated cases of profiteering on wealthy patients. If it were true that all great surgeons "profiteer" on their wealthy patients, we should be safe in saying that a greater part of the proceeds of their "profiteering" goes back into work done for the common good than in the case of any other group of professional or business men in America. If the trustees of Johns Hopkins Hospital would help solve the problem of the high cost of medical attention, let them attack the problem below the one-thousand-dollar line rather than above it.

If surgeons were prohibited from charging their wealthy patients very large fees, would they not be obliged to charge the average patient more than before? Yes, without a doubt. Here, as elsewhere, the meek and voiceless middle class would be the butt and burden-bearer of the situation. If the surgeon is barred from making his income in a few very high fees, he must make it in more fairly high fees. It is asserted that the Johns Hopkins ruling was made after "long consideration of all the conditions surrounding physicians and surgeons, the cost of living, the scale on which physicians and surgeons are required to live, and the like." It may be doubted, however, that this ruling takes into adequate account the amount of free work done by