“Moray, why don’t you speak?” cried Lucy, piteously. “Why, you’ve not been to sleep, have you?” and she caught his arm.
“Sleep?” he said, in a strangely absent manner.
“Yes, asleep? Poor mamma has been fretting herself to death about you, and thinking I don’t know what. Make haste.”
“Are you unwell, Alleyne?” said Oldroyd, quietly; and the other looked at him wistfully.
“No—no,” he said at length; “quite well—quite well. I have been thinking—that is all. Let us make haste back.”
Lucy and Oldroyd exchanged meaning glances, and then the former bit her lip, angry at having seemed to take the young doctor into her confidence; and after that but little was said till they reached The Firs, where Mrs Alleyne was pacing the hall, ready to fling her long, thin arms round her son’s neck, and hold him in her embrace as she tenderly reproached him for the anxiety he had caused.
“She doesn’t seem to trouble much about little Lucy,” thought the doctor. “Well, so much the more easy for any one who wanted her for a wife.”
“That couldn’t be me,” he said, at the end of a few minutes, and then—
“I wonder what all this means about Alleyne. He must have been having an interview with someone in that Grove. Miss Day, for a hundred. Humph! She must have said something he did not like, or he would not look like this.”
Then, to the great satisfaction of all, the doctor took his leave, and walked home declaring he would not think of Lucy any more, with the result that the more he strove, the more her pleasant little face made itself plain before him, her eyes looking into his, and illustrating the book he tried to read on every page with a most remarkable sameness, but a repetition that did not tire him in the least.