My Love An Altar — Joan Sargent

To Roxanne Collier, Dr. Vance Collier had become a shadow-husband, keeping up the facade of an empty marriage. So when Dr. Fritz Bascomb showed her that she was still a beautiful, desirable woman, she was grateful and flattered.

Then tragedy struck in the form of an epidemic that threatened the lives of the town's children. It was a time for some quick and deep soul-searching, for Vance and Roxanne faced not only the breakup of their marriage but the loss of their child.

The town of High Springs had grown up around the sanitarium--its whole reason for being. Dr. Vance Collier, chief of staff, lived next door to the sanitarium. And sometimes Vance thought that his work there was his whole reason for being.

His home had become to him a place for sleeping and eating, his need for the beautiful Roxanne--a picture of the perfect wife for any chief of staff--secondary to the need that drove him to spend long hours at the hospital, the need that dove him to try to find a cure for histoplasmosis, the mysterious virus that had multiplied out of all reason in the rural sections of the state.

Always coupled with Vance's thoughts of Roxanne--the wealthy girl who had married him solely because she loved him--was the thought that rankled most. Had he married her for the money that would make it possible for him to become a doctor? Did he owe all that he was--or ever would be--to Roxanne's father, who had made the dream possible?

It took an epidemic of the disease that Vance had tried so hard to conquer to wake up Vance Collier to the truth--and to make him his own man again.