“Damned interloper! let him wait till you're dead,” growled the Squire. “He shan't have a hand in finishing me off at any rate. I don't want any of their new-fangled notions.” And the Squire died as he had lived, on the old plan, with the old doctor.
When Eben Williams saw that he was about to meet Hetty Gunn, his emotions were hardly less conflicting than hers. He, too, would have liked to escape the meeting, for he had understood clearly that his presence in her house was most unwelcome to her. But he, too, had his own pride, as distinct and as strong as hers, and at the very moment that Hetty was saying to herself, “I'm on my own ground: I won't run away from the popinjay,” Dr. Eben was thinking in his heart, “What a fool I am to care a straw about meeting her! I'm about my own business, and she is an obstinate simpleton.”
The expressions of their faces as they met, and passed, with cold bows, were truly comical; each so thoroughly conscious of the other's antagonism, and endeavoring to look unconscious of it.
“By Jove, she's got a charming face, if she didn't look so obstinate,” said Dr. Eben to himself, as he hurried on.
“He looked at me as he'd have looked at a snake,” thought Hetty. “I guess he's an honest fellow after all. He's got a handsome beard of his own.”
When she entered Sally's room, Sally exclaimed, “Oh, Hetty! didn't you meet the doctor?”
“Yes,” said Hetty, coolly. Sally looked wistfully at her for a few seconds. “Oh, Hetty!” she said, “I thought, perhaps, if you saw him, you'd like him better.”
“I never said any thing against his looks, did I?” laughed Hetty. “He is a very handsome man: he is the handsomest man I ever saw, if that's all!”
“But it isn't all; it isn't any thing!” exclaimed Sally. “If he were an ugly dwarf, I should love him just as well. Oh, Hetty, if you only knew how good he was to me, when I was sick seven years ago! I should have died if it hadn't been for him. There wasn't a woman at the Corners that ever came near me, except Mrs. Patrick, the Irish woman I boarded with; and, he used to stop and make broth for me, on my stove, with his own hands, and sit and hold the baby on his knees, and talk to me so beautifully about her. He just kept me alive.”
Hetty's face flushed. Sally had never told her so much before; she could not help a glow at her heart, at the picture of the handsome young doctor sitting with the poor, outcast baby on his knees, and comforting the poor outcast mother. But Hetty was a Gunn; and, as Dr. Eben had said, obstinate. She could not forget her partisanship for Dr. Tuthill. She was even all the angrier with the young doctor for being so clever, so kind, so skilful, so handsome, and so pleasant, that everybody wanted him. “I dare say,” she replied. “He'd do any thing to curry favor. He's been determined from the first to get all the practice of the whole county, and I suppose as soon as Doctor Tuthill dies, he'll have it; and he may as well, for I don't doubt he's a good doctor: but I think it was a mean underhand thing to come in here and try to cut another man out.”