CONTENTS.
[I.] A young man from the country
[II.] A sensation author
[III.] Isabel
[IV.] The end of George Gilbert's holiday
[V.] George at home
[VI.] Too much alone
[VII.] On the bridge
[VIII.] About poor Joe Tillet's young wife
[IX.] Miss Sleaford's engagement
[X.] A bad beginning
[XI.] "She only said, 'my life is weary!'"
[XII.] Something like a birthday
[XIII.] "Oh, my cousin, shallow-hearted!"
[XIV.] Under Lord Thurston's oak
[XV.] Roland says, "Amen"
[XVI.] Mr. Lansdell relates an adventure
[XVII.] The first warning
[XVIII.] The second warning
[XIX.] What might have been!
[XX.] "Oceans should divide us!"
[XXI.] "Once more the gate behind me falls"
[XXII.] "My love's a noble madness"
[XXIII.] A little cloud
[XXIV.] Lady Gwendoline does her duty
[XXV.] "For love himself took part against himself"
[XXVI.] A popular preacher
[XXVII.] "And now I live, and now my life is done!"
[XXVIII.] Trying to be good.
[XXIX.] The first whisper of the storm
[XXX.] The beginning of a great change
[XXXI.] Fifty pounds
[XXXII.] "I'll not believe but Desdemona's honest"
[XXXIII.] Keeping a promise
[XXXIV.] Retrospective
[XXXV.] "'Twere best at once to sink to peace"
[XXXVI.] Between two worlds
[XXXVII.] "If any calm, a calm despair"
THE DOCTORS WIFE.
CHAPTER I.
A YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY
There were two surgeons in the little town of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire,—Mr. Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of the queer old High Street; and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. Pawlkatt derived from his aristocratic patients.
John Gilbert was an elderly man, with a young son. He had married late in life, and his wife had died very soon after the birth of this son. It was for this reason, most likely, that the surgeon loved his child as children are rarely loved by their fathers—with an earnest, over-anxious devotion, which from the very first had been something womanly in its character, and which grew with the child's growth. Mr. Gilbert's mind was narrowed by the circle in which he lived. He had inherited his own patients and the parish patients from his father, who had been a surgeon before him, and who had lived in the same house, with the same red lamp over the little old-fashioned surgery-door, for eight-and-forty years, and had died, leaving the house, the practice, and the red lamp to his son.