marry girls like that, I'd give up medicine and go on
a ranch." The Banbridge doctor said that. He was rather young, and
had been in the village about five years. He had taken the practice
of an old physician, a distant relative who had died six months
before. Dr. Wilson was called a remarkably able man in his
profession. He had been having several prescriptions filled, and kept
several waiting. He was a large man with a coarsely handsome physique
and a brutal humor with women. He was not liked personally, but the
people rather bragged about their great physician and were proud when
he was called to the towns round about.

"There's no getting Dr. Wilson, for a certainty, he has such an
enormous practice!" they said, with pride.

"That girl is as handsome and healthy as an Alderney cow," he added,
now, and the men laughed.

"She's a stunner," said Amidon.

Anderson went out abruptly without waiting to make his purchase. He
felt as repelled as only a man of his temperament can feel. No woman
could equal his sense of utter disgust, first with the quite innocent
girl herself, next with the young physician for his insistence upon
the subject. His wrath against young Eastman, his unreasoning and
ridiculous wrath, swelled high as he dwelt upon the outrage of his
desertion of a girl like his little Charlotte, that little creature
of fire and dew, for this full-blown rose of a woman--the outrage to
her and to himself. When he got home, his mother inquired anxiously
what the matter was.

"Nothing, dear," he replied, brusquely.

"You look as if something worried you," said she. She had been taking
a little evening toddle on her tiny, slippered feet out in the
old-fashioned flower-garden beside the house, and she had a little
bunch of sweet herbs, which she dearly loved, in her hand. She
fastened a sprig of thyme in his coat as she stood talking to him,
and the insistent odor seemed as real as a presence when he breathed.
"nothing has gone wrong with your business, has there?" she inquired,
lovingly.

"No, mother," he replied, and moved away from her gently, with the
fragrance of the thyme strong in his consciousness.

His mother put her sweet nosegay in water. Then she went to bed, and
Anderson sat on the stoop. Young Eastman and the Van Dorn girl passed
after he sat there, and he thought with a loving passion of
protection of poor little Charlotte alone at home. "I'll warrant the
poor child is watching for that good-f