Studdiford, who had been left with a large
fortune and a tiny boy some two years before. This was in Honolulu,
where people did a great deal of riding in those days, and it presently
befell that the doctor, two weeks before the day that had been set for
the wedding, found himself kneeling beside his lovely fiancee on a rocky
headland, as she lay broken and gasping where her horse had flung her,
and straining to catch the last few agonized words she would ever say:
"You'll--keep Jim--with you, Robert?"
How Doctor Toland brought the small boy to San Francisco, how he met the
dashing and indifferent Sally, and how she came at last to console him
for his loss, was another story, one that Mrs. Toland never tired of
telling. Little Jim had his place in their hearts from their wedding
day. Barbara was eleven years old when, with passionate grief, she
learned that he was not her half brother, and many casual friends did
not know it to this day. Jim, to the doctor's delight, chose to follow
the profession of his foster father, and had stumbled, with not too much
application, through medical college. Now he was to go to New York for
hospital work, and then to Berlin for a year's real grind, and until the
Eastern hospital should open classes, was back in his old enormous
third-floor bedroom upstairs, enjoying a brief season of idleness and
petting, the handsome, unaffected, sunshiny big brother of Mrs.
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