Robert was to accompany him to the station, and the hour of his arrival drew near. Yeldham's packing was quickly done, and he had a few minutes' leisure to think of the strangeness of the freak of fortune which was sending him in search of the only woman towards whom his heart had ever been attracted, with the object of winning her back to another. Perhaps he had censured her too harshly in talking to Gordon Frere--to that other man, who had also loved her, after his fashion. Then he heard Robert's step ascending the stairs, and sighed as he thought that it was hard indeed to look at his suffering face, and acquit Katharine of heartlessness and cruelty.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE PLEDGE REDEEMED.
In one of the old-fashioned hotels of the Rue de l'Université, in that quarter of Paris around which cling some of the saddest and noblest memoirs of a history which is but a succession of acts in a great pompous tragedy, Dr. Hudson had occupied a suite of apartments for many years. There were other and younger English physicians in Paris than he; but he had made, and kept, a solid reputation, and his friends comprised a large number of the native denizens of Paris, and all his own compatriots "of standing," as the Yankees say. His clientèle was of wider range; for the English doctor was as well known to the poor of Paris as to the rich, and he laboured among them as assiduously.
On the self-same day which had witnessed Mr. Thacker's visit to Middlemeads, and the failure of his application to Mrs. Gordon Frere--on which he had expressed himself with so much resentment to Charles Yeldham--and at the self-same hour at which the project of his vengeance began to take shape in the brain of the angry Hebrew,--Dr. Hudson was seated in his study, conversing earnestly with a lady, who wore the mournful garb of widowhood in the English form. The frank, thoughtful face of the physician was clouded, and his voice was low and troubled, as he spoke to the lady.
"I don't like to let you go, Katharine. You have been doing too much. This long attendance upon poor Louise has been too much for you already; and now the care of an old blind woman--no, no; it ought not to be."
"The care of your mother, my best friend!" returned the lady in a tone of remonstrance; "does that not make all the difference? Besides, what does it matter? here, or in Brittany? The work has to be done, and place does not make the smallest difference. You cannot bring the old lady to Paris; and since Marion's death you have had no peace of mind, no confidence about your mother. Let us look at this rationally. Is there any one in whom you have such confidence as in me?"
"Certainly not, Katharine, though----"
"Though I do not return it. Well, in one sense I do not; but let us not discuss that for the present. If you do not let me go to Morlaix, to your mother, you must send some one in whom you have less confidence. That's a 'logical sequence,' as you learned people say, isn't it?--and I should also call it a very silly proceeding. Next, you must provide me with work here; and I can assure you, you can give me none I should like half so well. I am free too, and I don't know that any other of your helpers are:--let me see the list."
She took a manuscript volume from the table, turned to a certain page, and ran over a list of names.