I asked Doctor Urquhart what he had been doing all this while? that I understood he had been a good deal engaged; was it about the barrack business, and his memorial?
“Partly,” he said; expressing some surprise at my remembering it.
Perhaps I ought not to have referred to it. And yet that is not a fair code of friendship. When a friend tells you his affairs, he makes them yours, and you have a right to ask about them afterwards. I longed to ask,—longed to know all and everything. For by every carriage-lamp we passed, I saw that his face was not as it used to be, that there was on it a settled shadow of pain, anxiety—almost anguish.
I have only known Doctor Urquhart three months, yet in those three months I have seen him every week, often twice and thrice a-week, and owing to the pre-occupation of the rest of the family, almost all his society has devolved on me. He and I have often and often sat talking, or in “playing decorum” to Augustus and Lisabel, walked up and down the garden together for hours at a time. Also, from my brother-in-law, always most open and enthusiastic on the subject, I have heard about Doctor Urquhart nearly everything that could be told.
All this will account for my feeling towards him, after so short an intimacy, as people usually feel, I suppose, after a friendship of years.
As I have said, something must have happened to make such a change in him. It touched me to the quick. Why not, at least, ask the question, which I should have asked in a minute of anybody else,—so simple and natural was it.—
“Have you been quite well since we saw you?”
“Yes.—No, not exactly. Why do you ask?”
“Because I thought you looked as if you had been ill.”
“Thank you, no. But I have had a great deal of anxious business on hand.”