aith preferred the pigeon to Dr. Harrison, and
discussed it quite to her mother's satisfaction. But if silent, she
thought never the less. Both Reuben Taylor's words and her mother's
words quickened her to thinking, and thinking seemed of very little
use. The next day when the doctor came she was as grave and still and
unresponsive as she could be. And it had no effect on him whatever. He
was just as usual, he talked just as usual; and Faith could but be
grieved, and be silent. It did not enter her gentle imagination that
the very things which so troubled her were spoken on purpose to trouble
her. How could it? when they made their way into the conversation and
into her hearing as followers of something else, as harpies that
worried or had worried somebody else, as shapes that a cloud might take
and be a cloud again--only she could not forget that shape. It was near
now the time for Mr. Linden to come home, and Faith looked for his
coming with an hourly breath of longing. It seemed to her that his very
being there would at once break the mesh Dr. Harrison was so busy
weaving and in which she had no power to stop him.

But the doctor's opportunity for playing this game was nearing an end,
and he knew it. He did not know that Mr. Linden was coming; he did know
that Faith was getting well.

A day or two after the talk with Reuben it happened that Mrs. Derrick
was detained down stairs when the doctor came up to see Faith. The room
was full of a May warmth and sweetness from the open windows; and Faith
herself in a white dress instead of the brown wrapper, looked May-like
enough. Not so jocund and blooming certainly; she was more like a
snowdrop than a crocus. Her cheeks were pale and thin, but their colour
was fresh; and her eye had the light of returning health,--or of
returning something else!

"You are getting well!" said the doctor. "I shall lose my work--and
forgive me, my pleasure!"

"I will give you some better work to do, Dr. Harrison."

"What is that? Anything for you!--"

"It is not for me. That little lame child to whom you sent the
rose-tree, Dr. Harrison,--she is very sick. Would you go and see her?"

"Did you think I would not?" he said rather gravely.

"I want to see her very much myself," Faith went on;--"but I suppose I
could not take so long a ride yet. Could I?"

The doctor looked at her.

"I think the mother of the Gracchi must have been something such a
woman!" he said with an indescribable