than any doctor can. They seem to think that there's more virtue in a
pill or a powder because a doctor gives it to one than because one's
common-sense tells one to take it. That afternoon I didn't need him any
more than a squirrel needs a pocket, and I told him so. He laughed, and
then grew serious.

"You're not looking as well as you did, Mrs. Evarts," he said, "and
Talbert told me that you had all the preliminary symptoms of one of your
attacks and wanted me to 'nip it in the bud,' he said."

"Dr. Denbigh," said I, "if the matter with me could be cured by the
things you know, there are other people in this house who need your
attention more than I." I wanted to add that if Cyrus would always be
as far-sighted as he has been about me there wouldn't be anything the
matter to-day, but I held my tongue.

"I see you're worried about something," the doctor said, very kindly.
"Mental anxiety pulls you down quicker than anything."

Then as he sat chatting with me so kind and good--there's something
about Dr. Denbigh that makes me think of my own father, although he is
young enough to be my son--I told him the whole thing, all except Aunt
Elizabeth's share in it. I merely told him that Henry Goward had written
to her and not to Peggy.

I felt very much better. He took what I told him seriously, and yet
not in the tragic way we did. He has a way of listening that is very
comforting.

"It seems absurd, I know, for an old woman like me to get upset just
because her grandchild does not get letters from her sweetheart," I told
him. "But you see, doctor, no one suffers alone in a family like ours.
An event like this is like a wave that disturbs the whole surface of the
water. Every one of us feels anything that happens, each in his separate
way. Why, I can't be sick without its causing inconvenience to Billy."
And it is true; people in this world are bound up together in an
extraordinary fashion; and I wondered if Henry Goward's mother was
unhappy too, and was wondering what it was Peggy had done to her boy,
for she, of course, will think whatever happens is Peggy's fault. The
engagement of these two young people has been like a stone thrown into a
pond, and it takes only a very little pebble to ruffle the water farther
than one would believe it possible.

After the doctor left, Ada came to sit with me. We were sewing quietly
when I heard voices in the hall. I heard Peggy say, "I want you to tell
mother." Then Billy growled