The Hitchcocks and the Sommerses came from the same little village in
Maine; they had moved west, about the same time, a few years before the
Civil War: Alexander Hitchcock to Chicago; the senior Dr. Sommers to
Marion, Ohio. Alexander Hitchcock had been colonel of the regiment in which
Isaac Sommers served as surgeon. Although the families had seen little of
one another since the war, yet Alexander Hitchcock's greeting to the young
doctor when he met the latter in Paris had been more than cordial.
Something in the generous, lingering hand-shake of the Chicago merchant had
made the younger man feel the strength of old ties.

"I knew your mother," Colonel Hitchcock had said, smiling gently into the
young student's face. "I knew her very well, and your father, too,--he was
a brave man, a remarkable man."

He had sympathetically rolled the hand he still retained in his broad palm.

"If Marion had only been Chicago! You say he died two years ago? And your
mother long ago? Where will you settle?"

With this abrupt question, Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly
intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came
to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the
vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a
good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since
the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago
agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had seemed to say. 'We mustn't
lose you.'

Those pleasant days in Paris had been rendered more memorable to the young
doctor by the friendship that came about between him and Miss Hitchcock--a