This I heard too—in a cheerful kind voice—and soon after I became quite myself, but ready to cry with vexation, or something, I don't know what.
“You will not tell anybody?” I entreated.
“No, not anybody,” said he, smiling, “if turning faint was such a crime. Now, you can walk? Only not alone, just at present, if you please.”
I do not marvel at the almost unlimited power which, Augustus says, Doctor Urquhart has over his patients. A true physician—not only of bodies, but souls.
We walked on, I holding his arm. For a moment, I was half afraid of Lisabel's laugh, and the silly etiquette of our neighbourhood; which holds that if a lady and gentleman walk arm-in-arm they must be going to be married. Then I forgot both, and only thought what a comfort it was in one's weakness to have an arm to lean on, and one that you knew, you felt, was not unwilling to have you resting there.
I have never said, but I will say it here, that I know Doctor Urquhart likes me—better than any other of my family; better, perhaps, than any friend he has, for he has not many. He is a man of great kindliness of nature, but few personal attachments. I have heard him say “that though he liked a great many people, only one or two were absolutely necessary to him.” Dallas might have been, had he lived. He told me, one day, there was a certain look in me which occasionally reminded him of Dallas. It is by these little things that I guess he likes me—at least, enough to make me feel, when with him, that rest and content that I never feel with those who do not care for me.
I made him laugh, and he made me laugh, several times, about trifles that, now I call them to mind, were not funny at all. Yet “it takes a wise man to make a fool, and none but a fool is always wise.”
With which sapient saying we consoled ourselves, standing at the edge of the larger pool, watching the other couple strolling along, doubtless very busy over the wild-duck affair.
“Your sister and Treherne seem to suit one another remarkably well. I doubted once if they would.”
“So did I. It ought to be a warning to us against hasty judgments. Especially here.” Mischief prompted the latter suggestion, for Doctor Urquhart must have recollected, as well as I did, the last and only time he and I had walked across this moorland-road, when we had such a serious quarrel, and I was more passionate and rude to him than I ever was to anybody—out of my own family. I hope he has forgiven me. Yet he was a little wrong too.