Part 8

“I will tell you some day, when I know you better.”

“Was it a compliment?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me now.”

“No, wait.”

He came to know her better; to know her very well. He did not see her very often, but he thought of her a great deal. He seemed to find in her a sympathy which he needed. It reminded him of the past. He awoke from his lethargy; began to work once more in the old way; mixed among men again; grew brighter. “Henry Floyd is growing younger, instead of older,” someone said of him. “His health has been bad,” said a doctor. “He is improving. I thought at one time he was going to die.” “He is getting rich,” said a broker, who had been a schoolmate of his. “I see he has just invented a new something or other to relieve children with hip or ankle-joint disease.”

“Yes, and it is a capital thing, too; it is being taken up by the profession. I use it. It is a curious thing that he should have hit on that when he is not a surgeon. He had studied anatomy as a sort of fad, as he does everything. One of Haile Tabb’s boys was bedridden, and he was a great friend of his, and that set him at it.”

“I don’t think he’s so much of a crank as he used to be,” said someone.

The broker who had been his schoolmate met Floyd next day.

“I see you have been having a great stroke of luck,” he said.

“Have I?”

“Yes. I see in the papers, that your discovery, or invention, or whatever it was, has been taken up.”

“Oh! yes--that? It has.”

“I congratulate you.”

“Thank you.”

“I would not mind looking into that.”

“Yes, it is interesting.”

“I might take an interest in it.”

“Yes, I should think so.”

“How much do you ask for it?”

“‘Ask for it?’ Ask for what?”

“For an interest in it, either a part or the whole?”

“What?”

“You ought to make a good thing out of it--out of your patent.”

“My patent! I haven’t any patent.”

“What! No patent?”

“No. It’s for the good of people generally.”

“But you got a patent?”