't be a brain-case, Dr. Conrad. What would your patients say if
they heard you go on like that?" Sally said this, of course. Her
mother thought to herself that perhaps the patients would send for
a married doctor.

But her mind was taking no strong hold on the current of events,
considering what a very vital human interest was afloat on them. It
was wandering back to another wedding-day--her own first wedding-day
of twenty years ago. As she looked at this bridegroom--all his
upspring of hope making light of such fears as needs must be in like
case all the world over--he brought back to her vividly, for all he
was so unlike him, the face of the much younger man who had met her
that day at Umballa, whose utter freedom from suspicion as he welcomed
her almost made her able to forget the weeks gone by--the more so that
they were like a dream in Hell, and their sequel like an awakening in
Paradise. Well, at any rate, she had recaptured this man from Chaos,
and he was hers again. And she had Sally. But at the word the whole
world reeled and her feet were on quicksands. What and whence was
Sally?

At least this was true--there was no taint of her father there! Sally
wasn't an angel--not a bit of it--no such embarrassment to a merely
human family. But her mother could see her truth, honour, purity--call
it what you will--in every feature, every movement. As she stood
there, giving injunctions to Vereker to look alive or he'd be late,
her huge coil of sea-soaked black hair making her white neck look
whiter, and her white hands reestablishing hair-pins in the depths of
it, she seemed the very incarnation of non-inheritance. Not a trace of
the sire her mother shuddered to think of in the music of her voice,
in the laughter all who knew her felt in the mirth of her eyebrows and
the sparkle of her pearly teeth. All her identity was her own. If only
it could have been known then that she was going to be Sally!... But
how fruitless all speculation was!

"Perhaps mother knows. Chemical oatmeal, mother, for invalids and
persons of delicate digestion? They haven't got it at Pemberton's."
The eyes and the teeth flash round on her mother, and in a twinkling
the unhallowed shadow of the past is gone. It was only a moment in
all, though it takes more to record it. Rosalind came back to the life
of the present, but she knew nothing about chemical oatmeal. Never
mind. The doctor would find out. And he would be sure to be in time.

He was