Barriers Burned Away

by Edward Payson Roe

"Give him a chance to tell you," said Mrs. Leonard, with a half-mischievous smile. "Has he not shown his feelings?"

"He has treated me more as a brother might have done, and yet he is so very respectful and deferential—I hope—but I am not perfectly sure—and then he seems under some restraint."

Mrs. Leonard said, musingly: "He knows that you are Baroness Ludolph. I told him last week, for I thought he ought to know, and the fact of your approaching departure for Europe has been no secret of late. He thinks you are pledged to a future in which he cannot share; and in your grateful, dependent condition he would not cause you the pain of refusing him. I think that is just where he stands," she concluded, with a woman's mastery of the science of love, and taking almost as much interest in her friend's affair as she had felt in her own. To most ladies this subject has a peculiar fascination, and, having settled their own matters, they enter with scarcely less zest on the task of helping others arrange theirs. Mrs. Leonard rallied faster under the excitement of this new interest than from the doctor's remedies.

After a few moments' thought Christine said, decidedly: "All that nonsense about the Baroness Ludolph is past forever—burned up in the fire with many things of more value. I have been fed too long on the husks of human greatness and ambition to want any more of them. They never did satisfy me, and in the light and heat of the terrific ordeal through which I have just passed they shrivelled into utter nothingness. I want something that I cannot lose in a whiff of smoke and flame, and I think I have found it. Henceforth I claim no other character than that of a simple Christian girl." Then bowing her head on her friend's shoulder she added, in a whisper, "If I could climb to true greatness by Mr. Fleet's side, as he portrayed it in his picture, it seems to me heaven would begin at once."

The doctor, who had taken the professor aside, now joined them, and said: "Mrs. Leonard, you have only to take reasonable care of yourself, and you will soon recover from this shock and exposure. I wish all my patients were doing as well."

She replied with a smile, taking her husband's hand: "Since I have found my old Greek here, with his learned spectacles, I am quite myself, and I feel as if I were only playing invalid."

"You may have slept in a church before," said the doctor, with a twinkle in his eye, "and you must do so again. But no one will thunder at you from the pulpit this time, so I leave you in peace and security, and to-night will be within call."

Christine followed him to the lobby of the church, when the irrepressible joker could not forbear saying: "Now let me give you a little paternal advice. Don't be too grateful to that young Fleet. He only did his duty, and of course doesn't deserve any special—"

Christine, with flushing cheeks, interrupted him as if she had not heard: "Doctor, how good and kind you are! Here you are off without any rest to look after the sick and suffering, and you seem to bring health and hope wherever you go."

"Yes, yes; but I send my bill in too—mind that." (Some of his poorer patients never received any, and he, when twitted of the fact, would mutter, roughly, "Business oversight—can't attend to everything.")