pressed the opinion that being active in a sanitarium was much to be desired by every doctor, if only because nowhere else were there offered conditions favourable to a really lasting relation between doctor and patients and, in addition, the opportunity of applying reliable, because constantly controllable, curative methods.
"To be sure, there is a great deal in that," said Doctor Graesler, in a tone of such reserve as he thought proper in an expert among laymen. Nor did this escape Sabine, who remarked quickly, with a slight blush:
"I happen to have engaged in nursing for a while myself, in Berlin."
"You don't mean it!" the doctor cried, and did not at first know what attitude he ought to take towards this disclosure. He therefore remarked somewhat indefinitely:
"A splendid, a noble profession. But dismal and difficult. And I can readily understand that you were soon drawn home again to the fresh air and the woods."
Sabine did not reply, and the others kept silence also; but Doctor Graesler suspected that conversation had just passed hard by the spot where, perhaps, the modest riddle of Sabine's existence lay hidden.
After dinner Karl insisted on his traditional right to a game of dominoes in the garden. The doctor was invited to join in; and soon—while the mother, reclining in a comfortable chair beneath the pines, gradually fell off into slumber over the needle-work which she had brought with her—the game was rattling cheerfully along. Doctor Graesler recalled certain gloomy hours spent with his dejected sister on Sunday afternoons in other years. He seemed to himself to have escaped miraculously from a melancholy and oppressive period of his life; and when Sabine, becoming aware of his abstraction, reminded him with a smiling glance or even with a light touch upon his arm to make another move, these little intimacies encouraged him to a mild and indefinable hope.
The dominoes were cleared away and a flower-embroidered cloth spread on the table; and as no carriage could that day be procured, the doctor had only time to drink a hasty cup of coffee with the others if he was to visit his patients (who could, of course, not dispense with him on Sundays) before late that evening. He took with him the memory of Sabine's smile and of a squeeze of her
