'No more doubt, no more trouble,' he fondly whispered. 'It shall be my life's care to guard my wife from all such, Florence—heaven permitting me.' Anything more that was said may as well be left to the reader's lively imagination. They arrived at home after awhile; and found Dr. Bevary there, talking still.
'How you must have hurried yourselves!' quoth he, turning to them. 'Clay, you ought to be ill from walking fast. What has kept him, Florence?'
'Not your patients, Doctor,' retorted Austin, laughing; 'though you are keeping them. One of them says you made an appointment with him. By the way he spoke, I think he was inwardly vowing vengeance against you for not keeping it.'
'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'we medical men do get detained sometimes. One patient has had the most of my time this day, poor lady!'
'Is she better?' quickly asked Florence, who always had ready sympathy for sickness and suffering: perhaps from having seen so much of it in her mother.
'No, my dear, she is dead,' was the answer, gravely spoken. 'And, therefore,' added the doctor in a different tone, 'I have no further excuse for absenting myself from those other patients who are alive and grumbling at me. Will you walk a few steps with me, Mr. Clay?'
Dr. Bevary linked his arm within Austin's as they crossed the hall, and they went out together. 'How did you become acquainted with that dark secret' he breathed.
'Through a misdirected letter of Miss Gwinn's,' replied Austin. 'After I had read it, I discovered that it must have been meant for Mr. Hunter, though addressed to me. It told me all. Dr. Bevary, I have had to carry the secret all these years, bearing myself as one innocent of the knowledge; before Mrs. Hunter, before Florence, before him. I would have given half my savings not to have known it.'
'You believed that—that—one was living who might have replaced Mrs. Hunter?'