"You can't tell me that a thing like that is done every day! Jacques, be honest—isn't it a very remarkable operation for a country doctor to perform?"
"Oh—for a country doctor, perhaps. For a surgeon who has had some experience, no."
"You are a surgeon, then, not a doctor?"
He smiled, that warm, flashing smile which always fell like a gleam of sunlight across her heart. "I am—whatever people need me to be."
It was true—physician, nurse, companion, guardian, friend—Jacques Benoix was always whatever people needed him to be.
In that moment, Kate realized that he had given up a great career to bring his sick wife into the country.
One of the closest bonds between them was a love for music. Kate's singing, untrained and faulty though it was, gave keen pleasure to his starved ears, and often he brought his little son to hear her; a boy of ten, rather grave and shy, but with his father's beautiful smile. Sometimes there were duets to be tried out together; Kildare, when he was at home, listening tolerantly and beating time out of time to the pleasant sounds they made.
But he was not often at home in those days. He sought his pleasure elsewhere. The guest-house had been empty for months.
Kate and Benoix found his frequent absences rather a relief. They were freer to discuss the things that did not interest him, to read aloud to each other, to play games with the exacting Apple-Blossom, an executive from her cradle. It was at last the sort of domestic life of which every girl dreams in her secret heart; and Kate grew lovelier than her loveliest.
Meanwhile the countryside watched, and whispered, and waited. The countryside was wise in the ways of Nature, if these two were not.