ll its treacheries, and was
indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water,
rowing or sailing; their afternoons in driving through the budding
and blossoming country. Always the baby lay in Hetty's lap: from the
beginning, his nurse had found herself perpetually set aside by Hetty's
imperious affection. As Eben Williams looked, day after day, on the
picture which Hetty and the baby made, he found himself day after day
more and more bewildered by Hetty. She had adopted towards him a uniform
manner of cordial familiarity, which had in it, however, no shade of
intimacy. If Hetty had been the veriest coquette living, she could
not have devised a more effectual charm to a man of Eben Williams's
temperament. He had come out unscathed from many sieges which had
been laid to him by women. He knew very well the ordinary methods, the
atmosphere of the average wooing or wooable woman, and he was proof
against them all. He was thirty years old and he had never yet been in
love. But this woman, who treated him with the same easy, unconscious
frankness with which men treat men, who never seemed to observe his
going or his coming, otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need
of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was
holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain
Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster
in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful,
and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed
lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben
was not usually given to concerning himself much as to other people's
opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty
Gunn thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old
prejudice against him; and whether, after this seaside idyl were over,
he should ever see her again. The more he pondered, the less he could
solve the question. No wonder. The simple truth was that Hetty was not
thinking about him at all. She had accepted the whole situation with
frankness and good sense: she found him kind, helpful, cheery, and
entertaining; the embarrassments she had feared, did not arise, and
she was very glad of it. She often said to herself: "The doctor is very
sensible. He does not show any foolish feeling of resentment;" and she
felt a sincere and increasing gratitude to him, because Sally and her