his eye expressed was merely a sympathetic regret
that he could not be more satisfactory.

"Perhaps," she suggested, "Mr. Barlow might know something."

"Well, now," said Maynard, "perhaps he might, that very thing. I'll
go round and ask him." He went to the stable, and she waited for his
return. "Barlow says," he reported, "that he guesses he's somewhere
about Leyden. At any rate, his mare,'s there yet, in the stable where
Barlow left her. He saw her there, yesterday."

"Thanks. That's all I wished to know," said Grace. "I wished to write to
him," she added boldly.

She shut herself in her room and spent the rest of the forenoon in
writing a letter, which when first finished was very long, but in its
ultimate phase was so short as to occupy but a small space on a
square correspondence-card. Having got it written on the card, she
was dissatisfied with it in that shape, and copied it upon a sheet
of note-paper. Then she sealed and addressed it, and put it into her
pocket; after dinner she went down to the beach, and walked a long way
upon the sands. She thought at first that she would ask Barlow to get
it to him, somehow; and then she determined to find out from Barlow the
address of the people who had Mr. Libby's horse, and send it to them
for him by the driver of the barge. She would approach the driver with a
nonchalant, imperious air, and ask him to please have that delivered
to Mr. Libby immediately; and in case he learned from the stable-people
that he was not in Leyden, to bring the letter back to her. She saw how
the driver would take it, and then she figured Libby opening and reading
it. She sometimes figured him one way, and sometimes another. Sometimes
he rapidly scanned the lines, and then instantly ordered his horse, and
feverishly hastened the men; again he deliberately read it, and then
tore it into stall pieces, with a laugh, and flung them away. This
conception of his behavior made her heart almost stop beating; but there
was a luxury in it, too, and she recurred to it quite as often as to the
other, which led her to a dramatization of their meeting, with all
their parley minutely realized, and every most intimate look and thought
imagined. There is of course no means of proving that this sort of
mental exercise was in any degree an exercise of the reason, or that Dr.
Breen did not behave unprofessionally in giving herself up to it. She
could only have claimed in self-defence that she was no longer a