He was sitting in his
wheel-chair with his books and manuscripts on a table at his elbow,
and he lifted an expectant face toward the gate as she entered.
It was strange what two months at Thornwood had done for the Doctor.
He had been brought there unconscious, a serious, middle-aged
professor, who had run in the same groove for twenty years. The same
surroundings, the same people, the same monotonous, daily routine had
rendered him as rusty and faded as the text-books he lived with.
Nothing short of a collision could have jolted him out of his rut, and
the collision had arrived.
The sudden change from the grim realism of a lecture platform, with
its bleak blackboard and creaking chalk, to the romance of an old
flower garden where blossoms flirted with each other across the
borders, and birds made love in every bough, was enough to freshen the
spirit of even a John Jay Queerington. His cosmic conscience, which
usually worked overtime, striving to solve problems which Nature had
given up, seemed to be asleep. His fine, serious face relaxed somewhat
from its austerity, and as the days passed he read less and observed
more.
His observations, before long, resulted in a discovery; he, who was so
weary of the cultivated hothouse species of femininity, had chanced
quite by accident upon a rare, unclassified wild-flower, that piqued
his curiosity and enlisted his interest.
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