er. Indeed, against Dr. Hamilton himself she had no grudge, but
he was the brother of a man she hated and whose relatives were
consequently taboo in Louisa's eyes. Not that the brother was a bad
man either; he had simply taken the opposite side to the Irvings in a
notable church feud of a dozen years ago, and Louisa had never since
held any intercourse with him or his fellow sinners.

Mary Isabel did not look at the Hamilton house. She kept her head
resolutely turned away as she went down the shore lane with its wild
sweet loneliness of salt-withered grasses and piping sea-winds. Only
when she turned the corner of the fir-wood, which shut her out from
view of the houses, did she look timidly over the line-fence. Dr.
Hamilton was standing there, where the fence ran out to the sandy
shingle, smoking his little black pipe, which he took out and put away
when Mary Isabel came around the firs. Men did things like that
instinctively in Mary Isabel's company. There was something so
delicately virginal about her, in spite of her forty years, that they
gave her the reverence they would have paid to a very young, pure
girl.

Dr. Hamilton smiled at the little troubled face under the big
sunbonnet. Mary Isabel had to wear a sunbonnet. She would never have
done it from choice.

"What is the matter?" asked the doctor, in his big, breezy,
old-bachelor voice. He had another voice for sick-beds and rooms of
bereavement, but this one suited best with the purring of the waves
and winds.

"How do you know that anything is the matter?" Mary Isabel parried
demurely.

"By your face. Come now, tell me what it is."

"It is really nothing. I have just been foolish, that is all. I wanted
a hat with forget-me-nots and a grey silk, and Louisa says I must have
black and a bonnet."

The doctor looked indignant but held his peace. He and Mary Isabel had
tacitly agreed never to discuss Louisa, because such discussion would
not make for harmony. Mary Isabel's conscience would not let the
doctor say anything uncomplimentary of Louisa, and the doctor's
conscience would not let him say anything complimentary. So they left
her out of the question and talked about the sea and the boats and
poetry and flowers and similar non-combustible subjects.

* * * * *

These clandestine meetings had been going on for two months, ever
since the day they had just happened to meet below the firs. It never
occurred to Mary Isabel