Pete was a very sick dog, but as Dr. Coburn boasted, no pampered patient in a private hospital ever had better care. Ultimately he recovered from his operation and went about gayly on three legs, but not until Venetia had made a good many visits to the squalid "laboratory" and had come to feel very much at home among the animals and scientific apparatus that the eccentric young doctor had gathered about him. Mrs. Phillips, naturally, had not consented to these visits to the "dog doctor," as she persisted in calling Pete\'s saviour, until Venetia had enlisted the services of Helen as chaperon. Then, being very much occupied these days with furnishing the new house, she paid little attention to Venetia\'s long afternoons spent in the company of the architect\'s wife.

These visits were, perhaps, the most educational experiences that the girl had ever had. One day she and Helen had watched the doctor take apart the queer-looking pump that occupied the post of honor in the laboratory, examined the delicate valves of the machine, and learned the theory of its use. Once they got courage to witness voluntarily its application on a rabbit. Venetia winced nervously when she saw the long gold needle sink into the tender breast of the small beast, the muscles relax, the heart stop beating altogether; but she worked one of the valves of the pump steadily as the doctor directed.

"Ain\'t that quick work!" he shouted enthusiastically. "It didn\'t take the stuff thirty seconds to strike the right spot."

Venetia nodded her head gravely, as he proceeded step by step in his demonstration. When he finished she asked with a gravity that made Helen smile:—

"Aren\'t you a very celebrated man?"

Even her world paid some respect to notable achievements in science, and she had heard Judge Phillips speak admiringly of certain recent discoveries by a famous physiologist. The doctor, however, roared with ironic laughter.

"Not celebrated exactly! At the medical societies they call me the crazy fakir. I don\'t believe there\'s a first-class doctor in the city who would take the time to look at this machine. They\'d want to know first what some feller in Vienna thought about it. I might starve for all the help I\'ve ever had here! Doctors don\'t want any one to do things on his own hook: they\'re jealous, just as jealous as women. But I guess I\'m going to show \'em a thing or two not in the books. Let me tell you on the quiet, Miss Venetia,—I\'m going over to Paris with this pump of mine and show it off in one of their hospitals. Then you\'ll see something!"

The girl tried to look intelligent.

"If I can convince some Frenchman or German that I am on to a big idea, why the whole pack of pill-sellers over here will fall into line so quick you can\'t see \'em."

"Perhaps we shall go over to Paris this summer, too. How I should like to be there when you are, and see you show the pump!"

In her experience there was nothing remarkable in going to Europe: one went to hear an opera, to order a few gowns, to fill out an idle vacation.

"Well, I may have to go steerage, but I\'ll get there somehow."

While they had been discussing the machine, a small, white-faced man, who looked as if he might be a waiter or some kind of skilled mechanic, had come into the laboratory and nodding to the doctor took a chair at the farther end of the room with the manner of one who was quite at ease in the place. His face, which was aged by illness or care, interested Helen greatly. She watched him while the others talked, wondering what his relation to the doctor could be, whether that of patient or friend. He sat huddled up on his chair, one worn-out boot thrust forward from a ragged trouser leg, curiously scanning the young girl, who seemed in her fresh beauty and rich clothes decidedly out of harmony with the dingy room. When Venetia spoke of going abroad as casually as she might have mentioned going to the country, a sarcastic smile crept over his face. He seemed to possess the full power of patience, as if a varied experience with a buffeting world had taught him to accept rather than to resist. His business there, whatever it might be, could wait, had always waited.

"Hussey, here, is the only feller that I ever found besides myself who has any faith in the old pump," Coburn remarked presently by way of introduction, half turning toward the silent man, and smiling as if he thoroughly enjoyed the joke of having this one convert. "He\'s always after me to try it on him,—he says he\'s got something the matter with his lungs,—but I guess it\'s purely a scientific interest that makes him offer to be the first victim. Gee! Wouldn\'t I like to take him at his word!"

He worked one of the delicate valves of the machine, squirting through the needle a thin stream of water in the direction of Hussey.

"Why don\'t you do it then?" the man asked in an indifferent tone. "I\'m ready any time you say."

"Ain\'t he got nerve, now?" the doctor appealed to Venetia, his eyes twinkling sardonically. "Any doctor would tell him for nothing that it was just plain murder to stick that needle into his lungs. If I am wrong, you know, he\'d be a goner, bleed to death."

"I guess I ain\'t built very different from that guinea-pig," the man observed placidly. "And I have seen you put it into one of them often enough."

"Why don\'t you try it, if he\'s willing?" Venetia asked the doctor breathlessly.

Helen and Coburn laughed, and even the silent Hussey smiled grimly.

"Maybe, young lady, you wouldn\'t mind if I tried it on you! Can\'t you get up a real good heart trouble now?" the doctor quizzed.

"Would it make any particular difference if I hadn\'t anything the matter with me?" Venetia asked quickly. "You can put it into me and see what it does, anyway."

"Good nerve!" Coburn laughed admiringly. "See, Mrs. Hart, I\'ve got two converts now. Don\'t you want to make a third?"

Then bursting into his loud laugh, which seemed to be directed at himself, Coburn walked to the rear of the room, raised a trap-door, and whistled for Pete. He thrust his hand down, caught the dog by the neck, and placed him on the laboratory table for exhibition.

"Nothing worse than a good aristocratic limp, Peter," the doctor pronounced with complacency. "Just come here and look at that ear, Venetia! What do you think of that? It isn\'t quite the right shade, but I couldn\'t lay my hands on a terrier that was as dark as Pete."

"What have you done to his ear?" the girl demanded.

"He hadn\'t much of an ear left, when I came to look him over. So I grafted a new piece on. And I cropped it, too, so it would look like its mate. Pretty neat job?"

"That\'s why you wouldn\'t let me see his head when you were changing the bandages!"

"Sure! This ear was to be a real Christmas surprise for a good little girl."

"Poor old Pete!"

"What\'s the matter with Pete? Don\'t drop your tears that way. He\'s forgotten by this time he ever had another leg. Say!" he added abruptly, "what do you think the job\'s worth?"

"I don\'t know," Venetia replied a little haughtily. "Please send your bill to mamma."

"And suppose I make it half what Dr. Cutem would charge for doing the same job on you, what would mamma say? Pete\'s worth half, ain\'t he, Mrs. Hart?"

"Not to me," Helen answered lightly.

"Well, you\'d have thought he was the way she went on about him that afternoon I found them out in the street. But that\'s the luck of a poor doctor. You do your best, and, the patient cured, the bill seems large!"

The doctor\'s joke evidently distressed Venetia, who had been taught that it was low to discuss bills. The silent man still smiling to himself over the girl, rose and spoke to the doctor in a low tone. Coburn nodded.

"The same thing? Yes, I\'ll be over pretty soon."

Then Hussey left the laboratory with a slight nod of his head in the direction of the women. When he had gone and the outer door had banged behind him, the doctor remarked thoughtfully:—

"I guess it isn\'t just pure interest in science that makes him ready to try the pump."

"Tell me about him," Helen asked quickly.

"He lost his little girl two months ago,—malnutrition, that is to say slow starvation, and I guess his wife\'s not got long to live. That\'s why he came in this afternoon. But I can\'t do anything for her now, nor anybody else. She\'s just beat out. They came from somewhere in Pennsylvania, a little country place. He\'s a bookbinder by trade,—does fancy work,—and work gave out in the country, so he tried New York. He had some kind of trouble there with the union and came on here. But he might as well have stayed where he was,—there ain\'t anything in this town for him, and the union is after him again. He\'s been up against it pretty much ever since he started. That\'s his story."

"Poor woman!" Helen exclaimed, with a quick sense of her own new happiness. "Do you suppose she would like to have me call on her?"

"I don\'t know. Perhaps she might. But he\'s rather sour on folks in general," the doctor answered indifferently.

"Where do they live?"

"Out west here a ways on Arizona Avenue."

"I know that district. The River settlement is over there on Arizona Avenue. But I didn\'t know any Americans lived there. They are mostly Poles or Germans, I thought," Helen added.

"I guess people like the Husseys live most anywhere they can find a hole to crawl into," Coburn answered brusquely. "So you are one of those settlement cranks?"

"I had classes there for a time before I was married," Helen admitted.

"Got sick of it? Found you couldn\'t scrub up the world in a few weeks, or even a small piece of it? I took you for a woman of too much sense to mix in that foolishness. It might do Venetia here some good, teach her a thing or two. She never rode in a street car till I showed her how."

"I only gave it up when I was going to marry, and my husband thought I was not strong enough," Helen protested stoutly. "But it\'s the most interesting—"

"See here! Look at this floor. Would it clean it any to pour a spoonful of water here and there? Well, that\'s what your social settlements with all their statistics and their investigations are doing. I tell you I know because I have been one of them, one of the \'masses.\' I have been dirt poor all my life. I lived once for six months in a tenement room with five other men. \'Understanding and sympathy\'? Rot! You can\'t really know anything about folks until you earn your bread as they do, because you have to or starve; and ............