weeks out of a sick room and
not let Mr. Linden find out that she herself was there all the while.
His letters however were both a help and a spur; Faith talked a good
deal of things not at Pattaquasset; and through all weakness and ailing
sent her exercises prepared with utmost care, regularly as usual. It
hurt her; but Faith would not be stopped. Her sickness she knew after
all was but a light matter; and nothing could persuade her to break in
upon Mr. Linden's term of study with any more interruptions for her.
And even to Mrs. Derrick she did not tell the keen heart-longing, which
daily grew more urgent, for that term to come to an end.

Mrs. Derrick did sometimes connect the cause of her weariness with Dr.
Harrison, and was indignant in proportion. Faith looked at him with
different eyes, and her feeling was of very gentle and deep sorrow for
him. It was by the appeal to that side of her character that Dr.
Harrison gained all his advantage.

Faith's shield caught his arrows of unbelieving suggestion and threw
them off from her own heart; she could not put that shield between them
and the doctor, and that was her grief. It grieved her more than he
thought. And yet, it was with a half conscious, half instinctive
availing himself of this feeling that he aimed and managed his attacks
with such consummate tact and skill. Faith would not have entered into
controversy; she would not have taken up a gauntlet of challenge; did
he know that? His hints and questions were brought into the subject,
Faith knew not how; but the point of view in which they always
presented themselves was as troublers of his own mind--difficulties he
would willingly have solved--questions he would like to see answered.
And Faith's words, few or many, for she was sometimes drawn on, were
said in the humble yearning desire to let him know what she rejoiced in
and save him from an abyss of false fathomless depth. It was more than
she could do. Dr. Harrison's subtle difficulties and propositions had
been contrived in a school of which she knew nothing; and were far too
subtle and complicate in their false wit for Faith's true wit to
answer. Not at all for lack of wit, but for lack of skill in fencing
and of experience in the windings of duplicity. So she heard things
that grieved her and that she could not shew up to the doctor for what
she knew them to be.

"I am no better than this little knife!" she thought bitterly one day,
as she was looking at