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'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
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