meet on the simple ground of friendship and relationship. Moreover, I
shrank from setting gossips' tongues going again on the subject of my
chances of marrying my cousin; so I remained at home, alone, evening
after evening, unless I was called out professionally, declining all
invitations, and brooding unwholesomely over my grief. There is no more
cowardly a way of meeting a sorrow. But I was out of heart, and no words
could better express the morbid melancholy I was sinking into.

There was some tedious legal business to go through, for my mother's
small property, bringing in a hundred a year, came to me on her death. I
could not alienate it, but I wished Julia to receive the income as part
payment of my father's defalcations. She would not listen to such a
proposal, and she showed me that she had a shrewd notion of the true
state of our finances. They were in such a state that if I left Guernsey
with my little income my father would positively find some difficulty in
making both ends meet; the more so as I was becoming decidedly the
favorite with our patients, who began to call him slightingly the "old
doctor." No path opened up for me in any other direction. It appeared as
if I were to be bound to the place which was no longer a home to me.

I wrote to this effect to Jack Senior, who was urging my return to
England. I could not bring myself to believe that this dreary,
monotonous routine of professional duties, of very little interest or
importance, was all that life should offer to me. Yet for the present my
duty was plain. There was no help for it.

I made some inquiries at the lodging-house in Vauvert Road, and learned
that the person who had been in search of Olivia had left Guernsey about
the time when I was so fully engrossed with my mother as to have but
little thought for any one else. Of Olivia there was neither trace nor
tidings. Tardif came up to see me whenever he crossed over from Sark,
but he had no information to give to me. The chances were that she was
in London; but she was as much lost to me as if she had been lying
beside my mother under the green turf of Foulon Cemetery.

CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH.

THE WIDOWER COMFORTED.

In this manner three months passed slowly away after my mother's death.
Dr. Dobree, who was utterly inconsolable the first few weeks, fell into
all his old maundering, philandering ways again, spending hours upon his
toilet, and paying devoted attentions to every