David smiled a little as he explained that, quite apart from any question of income, the hospital experience was valuable to him. "I wouldn't give it up, Mrs. Maitland, if I had a million dollars!" he said, with a convincing exaggeration that was like the old David. "But it's mighty kind in you. Please believe I do appreciate your kindness."

"No kindness about it," she said impatiently; "my family is in your debt, David." At which he hardened instantly.

"Well," she said; and was silent for awhile, biting her finger and looking down at her boots. Suddenly, with a grunt of satisfaction, she began to hit the arm of her chair softly with her closed fist. "I've got it!" she said. "I suppose you wouldn't refuse the trusteeship of a fund, one of these days, to build a hospital? Near my Works, maybe? I'm all the time having accidents. I remember once getting a filing in my eye, and—and somebody suggested a doctor to take it out. A doctor for a filing! I guess you'd have been equal to that job—young as you are? Still, it wouldn't be bad to have a doctor round, even if he was young, if anything serious happened. Yes, a hospital near the Works—first for my men and then for outsiders. It is a good idea! I suppose you wouldn't refuse to run such a hospital, and draw your wages, like a man?"

"Well, no, I wouldn't refuse that," he said, smiling. It was many weeks since David had smiled so frankly. A strange thing had happened in that moment when he had forgotten himself in trying to comfort Blair's mother—his corroding suspicion of Elizabeth seemed to melt away! In its place was to come, a little later, the dreadful but far more bearable pain of enduring remorse for his own responsibility for Elizabeth's act. But just then, when he tried to comfort that poor mother, there was only a breaking of the ice about his own heart in a warm gush of pity for her…. "I don't see that there's much chance of funds for hospitals coming my way," he said, smiling.

"You never can tell," said Mrs. Maitland.

CHAPTER XXVI

The morning Blair heard his sentence from his mother, Elizabeth spent in her parlor in the hotel, looking idly out of the window at the tawny current of the river covered with its slipping sheen of oil. Steamboats were pushing up and down or nosing into the sand to unload their cargoes; she could hear the creak of hawsers, the bang of gangplanks thrown across to the shore, the cries and songs of stevedores sweating and toiling on the wharf that was piled with bales of cotton, endless blue barrels of oil, and black avalanches of coal. She did not think of Blair's ordeal; she was not interested in it. She was not interested in anything. Sometimes she thought vaguely of the letter which had never been and would never be written to David, and sometimes of that message from him which she had not yet been able to hear from Miss White's lips; but for the most part she did not think of anything. She was tired of thinking. She sat huddled in a chair, staring dully out of the window; she was like a captive bird, moping on its perch, its poor bright head sinking down into its tarnished feathers. She was so absorbed in the noise and confusion of traffic that she did not hear a knock. When it was repeated, she rose listlessly to answer it, but before she reached the door it opened, and her uncle entered. Elizabeth backed away silently. He followed her, but for a moment he was silent, too—it seemed to Robert Ferguson as if youth had been wiped out of her face. Under the shock of the change in her, he found for a moment nothing to say. When he spoke his voice trembled—with anger, she thought. "Mrs. Richie wrote me that I must come and see you. I told her I would have nothing to do with you."

Elizabeth sat down without speaking.

"I don't see what good it does to come," he said, staring at the tragic face. "Of course you know my opinion of you." She nodded. "So why should I come?"

"I don't know."