did so, his glance travelling straight across the street
met at last the glance of those hostile eyes that watched him. There
were two pairs, and they belonged to the Misses Pitt, two amiable,
sentimental maiden ladies who yielded to none in Bridgewater in their
worship of the handsome Monmouth.

Mr. Blood smiled and inclined his head, for he was on friendly terms
with these ladies, one of whom, indeed, had been for a little while his
patient. But there was no response to his greeting. Instead, the eyes
gave him back a stare of cold disdain. The smile on his thin lips grew a
little broader, a little less pleasant. He understood the reason of that
hostility, which had been daily growing in this past week since Monmouth
had come to turn the brains of women of all ages. The Misses Pitt,
he apprehended, contemned him that he, a young and vigorous man, of a
military training which might now be valuable to the Cause, should stand
aloof; that he should placidly smoke his pipe and tend his geraniums on
this evening of all evenings, when men of spirit were rallying to the
Protestant Champion, offering their blood to place him on the throne
where he belonged.

If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he
might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring,
he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally
intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man
of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer. But they would have
answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it behoved every man who
deemed himself a man to take up arms. They would have pointed out that
their own nephew Jeremiah, who was by trade a sailor, the master of a
ship--which by an ill-chance for that young man had come to anchor at
this season in Bridgewater Bay--had quitted the helm to snatch up a
musket in defence of Right. But Mr. Blood was not of those who argue. As
I have said, he was a self-sufficient man.

He closed the window, drew the curtains, and turned to the pleasant,
candle-lighted room, and the table on which Mrs. Barlow, his
housekeeper, was in the very act of spreading supper. To her, however,
he spoke aloud his thought.

"It's out of favour I am with the vinegary virgins over the way."

He had a pleasant, vibrant voice, whose metallic ring was softened and
muted by the Irish accent which in all his wanderings he had never lost.
It was a voice that could