tern swung at the door of the surgeon's room, he stood still and read again the words:—
"Miss Matilda Bennet,
"Provincetown,
"Mass."
He looked attentively at the little stamped Cupid on the top of the sheet. Joe had no experience in mythological art, and did not know a Cupid when he saw one. A naked baby with a bow and arrow was as much of a puzzle to him as an unprecedented fossil to a naturalist. The word "Provincetown" also set Joe to thinking. He recollected dimly how on the map he studied at school the word Provincetown stretched away from the tip of Massachusetts out into the blue space of the Atlantic Ocean beyond. It seemed to fly like a signal at a prow, and the little dot which represented the town had been half on, half off, the coast, he remembered. "Poor thing!" he thought, "she lives away down there. I wonder what sort of a girl she is, and what she ever stuck her name into these stockings for. I might write and thank her for them."
This last idea Joe dismissed with a scornful laugh at himself as a "silly booby;" but he folded up the little pink paper, and put it away carefully in his big leather wallet
Three days later Joe Hale lay flat on his back
