bird-bright eyes.

The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more
offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most,
spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a
journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and
fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold
of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the
decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she said
to herself,

"Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo," and she instinctively felt
the little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she
ever wore, or had ever worn.

"Sensible of her not to bring a maid," commented the Young Doctor
inwardly. "That would have thrown Kitty into a fit. Yet how she manages
to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is
beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways. Not what you
would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier," he reflected as
he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of
the checks for it.

"My husband--is--is he quite better now?" Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp
anxiety, as the two-seated "rig" started away with the ladies in the
back seat.

"Oh, better, thanks to him," was Kitty's reply, nodding towards the
Young Doctor.

"You have told him I was coming?"

"Wasn't it better to have a talk with you first?" asked Kitty meaningly.

Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
then she looked Kitty in the eyes.

"You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it," was
her enigmatical reply. "And of course you will tell me. You did not let
him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?"

"Oh, you got his cable?" questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph
in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor. It did reach
him, and he replied to the question.

"We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country
planned his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did
not, unfortunately, take you into account."

The little lady blushed, or flushed. "May I ask how you know this to be
so, if it is so?" she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
her t