'Hush, you must not talk,' he said, with a grave, professional air, 'and you must drink this,' so authoritatively that Mildred could not choose but to obey. 'It is nothing of consequence,' he continued, noticing an anxious look on her face; 'the room was hot, and our talk wearied you. I noticed you were very pale when we came in.' And Mildred felt relieved, and asked no more questions.
She was very thankful for the kindness that shielded her from all questioning and comment. When Dr. Heriot had watched the reviving effects of the cordial, and had satisfied himself that there would be no return of the faintness, he quietly but peremptorily desired that Polly should leave her. 'You would like to be perfectly alone for a little while, would you not?' he said, as he adjusted the rug over her feet and placed the screen between her and the firelight, and Mildred thanked him with a grateful glance. How could he guess that silence was what her exhausted nerves craved more than anything?
But Dr. Heriot was not so impervious as he seemed. He was aware that some nervous malady, caused by secret anxiety or hidden care, was wasting Mildred's fine constitution. The dilated pupils of the eyes, the repressed irritability of manner, the quick change of colour, with other signs of mental disturbance, had long ago attracted his professional notice, and he had racked his brains to discover the cause.
'She has over-exerted herself, or else she has some trouble,' he said to himself that night, as he sat beside his solitary fire. She had crept away to her own room during the interval of peace that had been allowed her, and he had not suffered them to disturb her. 'I will come and see her to-morrow,' he had said to Olive; 'let her be kept perfectly quiet until then;' and Olive, who knew from experience the soothing effects of his prescription, mounted guard herself over Mildred's room, and forbade Polly or Chriss to enter.
Dr. Heriot had plenty of food for meditation that night. In spite of his acquiescence in Polly's decision, he felt chilled and saddened by the girl's persistence.
For the first time he gravely asked himself, Had he made a mistake? Was she too young to understand his need of sympathy? Would it come to this, that after all she would disappoint him? As he looked round the empty room a strange bitterness came over him.
'And it is to this loneliness that she will doom me for another year,' he said, and there was a heavy cloud on his brow as he said it. 'If she really loved me, would she abandon me to another twelvemonth of miserable retrospection, with only Margaret's dead face to haunt me with its strange beauty?' But even as the thought passed through him came the remembrance of those clinging arms and the dark eyes shining through their tears.
'I love you dearly—dearly—but I want to love you more.'
'Oh, Heartsease,' he groaned, 'I fear that the mistake is mine, and that I have not yet won the whole of your innocent heart. I have taken it too much as a matter of course. Perhaps I have not wooed you so earnestly as I should have wooed an older woman, and yet I hardly think I have failed in either devotion or reverence. Ah,' he continued, with an involuntary sigh, 'what right have I to complain if she withhold her fresh young love—am I giving her all that is in me to give?' But here he stopped, as though the reflection pained him.
He remembered with what sympathy Mildred had advocated his cause. She had looked excited—almost indignant—as Polly had uttered her piteous protest for time. Had her clear eyes noticed any signs of vacillation or reluctance? Could he speak to her on the subject? Would she answer him frankly? And then, for the first time, he felt as though he could not so speak to her.