pocket, and, putting on a pair of
horn-rimmed eye-glasses, he read it through very carefully. Without
any design of playing the spy I could not help observing that it was in
a woman's hand. When he had finished it he read it again, and then sat
with the corners of his mouth drawn down and his eyes staring vacantly
out over the bay, the most forlorn-looking old gentleman that ever I
have seen. All that is kindly within me was set stirring by that
wistful face, but I knew that he was in no humour for talk, and so, at
last, with my breakfast and my patients calling me, I left him on the
bench and started for home.

I never gave him another thought until the next morning, when, at the
same hour, he turned up upon the headland, and shared the bench which I
had been accustomed to look upon as my own. He bowed again before
sitting down, but was no more inclined than formerly to enter into
conversation. There had been a change in him during the last
twenty-four hours, and all for the worse. The face seemed more heavy
and more wrinkled, while that ominous venous tinge was more pronounced
as he panted up the hill. The clean lines of his cheek and chin were
marred by a day's growth of grey stubble, and his large, shapely head
had lost something of the brave carriage which had struck me when first
I glanced at him. He had a letter there, the same, or another, but
still in a woman's hand, and over this he was moping and mumbling in
his senile fashion, with his brow puckered, and the corners of his
mouth drawn down like those of a fretting child. So I left him, with a
vague wonder as to who he might be, and why a single spring day should
have wrought such a change upon him.

So interested was I that next morning I was on the look out for him.
Sure enough, at the same hour, I saw him coming up the hill; but very
slowly, with a bent back and a heavy head. It was shocking to me to
see the change in him as he approached.

"I am afraid that our air does not agree with you, sir," I ventured to
remark.

But it was as though he had no heart for talk. He tried, as I thought,
to make some fitting reply, but it slurred off into a mumble and
silence. How bent and weak and old he seemed--ten years older at the
least than when first I had seen him! It went to my heart to see this
fine old fellow wasting away before my eyes. There was the eternal
letter which he unfolded with his shaking fingers. Who was this woman
whose words