he had no sort of predilection for resident patients because their treatment usually brought him neither much glory nor much gain. But as he rode up the valley in the mild evening air, smoking a good cigar, and along a lovely road dotted on either side with pretty country-houses, then on between yellow fields lying in the cool shadow of the hills, and finally through a grove of tall box-wood trees, he began to feel more contented; and when at last he caught sight of The Range, whose charming location he recollected well from many of his walks in bygone years, he almost regretted that the trip was so soon over. He bade the driver stop at the edge of the road, and took the narrow meadow-path winding up through the young pines towards the house, which seemed to give him friendly greeting with its blinking little windows, its huge pair of antlers hung above the narrow front door, and the glow of the evening sun on its reddish roof. Down the wooded steps leading to the comparatively spacious side-terrace there advanced to meet the doctor a young lady whose appearance seemed to him familiar from the very first glance. She shook hands with him, and then reported that her mother had been taken ill with indigestion.
"She has been sleeping quietly now for an hour," she went on. "The fever has evidently gone down. At four o'clock it was still up to a hundred and one and a tenth. And as she has been feeling miserable since yesterday evening, I took the liberty of asking you to come here, Doctor. I hope it will turn out to be nothing serious." At the same time she cast at him a look of demure entreaty, as though the further development of the case depended entirely on his decision.
He returned her gaze with becoming, but gentle, gravity. To be sure, he knew her. He had encountered her several times in town, but had always taken her for a summer guest.
"Well, if your mother is now sleeping quietly," he said, "it can hardly be anything serious. Perhaps you might give me some of the details, Fräulein, before the patient proves, after all, to have been awakened unnecessarily."
She invited him to walk up with her, went on ahead to the veranda, and offered him a chair while she remained leaning against the jamb of an open door leading into the interior of the house. In a strictly objective fashion she gave him an account of the course of the illness, and there soon remained no doubt in Doctor Graesler's mind that here there was no question of anything more than a
