ers.

He darts back into the shadow, squeezing himself against the wall. Anne
calls to him laughingly, then, as he does not answer, with a frightened
accent:

"John,--John, dear. Was not that you? Are not you there?"

He holds his breath, and crouches still closer into the dark corner; and
Anne, thinking she must have been mistaken in the dim light, passes him
and goes upstairs.

Then he creeps stealthily to the door, lets himself out and closes it
softly behind him.

After the lapse of a few minutes the old housekeeper plods upstairs and
delivers John's message. Anne, finding it altogether incomprehensible,
subjects the poor dame to severe examination, but fails to elicit
anything further. What is the meaning of it? What "business" can have
compelled John, who for ten weeks has never let the word escape his lips,
to leave her like this--without a word! without a kiss! Then suddenly
she remembers the incident of a few moments ago, when she had called to
him, thinking she saw him, and he did not answer; and the whole truth
strikes her full in the heart.

She refastens the bonnet-strings she has been slowly untying, and goes
down and out into the wet street.

She makes her way rapidly to the house of the only doctor resident in the
neighbourhood--a big, brusque-mannered man, who throughout these terrible
two months has been their chief stay and help. He meets her on her
entrance with an embarrassed air that tells its own tale, and at once
renders futile his clumsy attempts at acting:--

How should he know where John is? Who told her John had the fever--a
great, strong, hulking fellow like that? She has been working too hard,
and has got fever on the brain. She must go straight back home, or she
will be having it herself. She is more likely to take it than John.

Anne, waiting till he has finished jerking out sentences while stamping
up and down the room, says gently, taking no notice of his denials,--"If
you will not tell me I must find out from some one else--that is all."
Then, her quick eyes noting his momentary hesitation, she lays her little
hand on his rough paw, and, with the shamelessness of a woman who loves
deeply, wheedles everything out of him that he has promised to keep
secret.

He stops her, however, as she is leaving the room. "Don't go in to him
now," he says; "he will worry about you. Wait till to-morrow."

So, while John lies counting endless casks of tallow, Anne sits by his