"Remember, Miss Primrose, you are not a mother," snapped a certain sharp-tongued matron of our town who had disagreed with her.
"Oh," said Letitia, "but I have loved so many children. I am a kind of mother."
"Mother!" cried the matron.
"Yes," Letitia answered. "I am a mother—without a child."
Had they been her children, it had been easier to forgive their thoughtlessness. Offended sometimes by her discipline, they said plain things of her lack of pretty youth; they whispered lies of her; she shed some tears, I know, over those scribblings which she intercepted or found forgotten on the school-room floor. Then her garden was the abode of shadows, her efforts vain there. Sometimes, for solace, she sought out Dove, but the habit of lonely thinking had grown upon her; it had been enforced by her maidenhood.
While I am not a herb-doctor by diploma, I am one by faith, simples have wrought such speedy cures in my own gray hours, and Grassy-Fordshire is so green with them that a walk by Troublesome or a climb on Sun Dial is in itself a marvellous remedy, aromatic and anodyne. In my drives to patients beyond the town, I have been seized suddenly by a kind of fever. There are no pills for it, or powders, or any drugs in all the bottles on my shelves—but a jointed fishing-rod and line kept in the bottom of a doctor's buggy is efficacious if applied in time. Often when that spell was on me I have turned Pegasus towards the nearest stream, and while he nibbled, one hour on a scented bank, fish or not—sixty drops from the grass-green phial of a summer's day—has restored my soul. Clattering home again at double-quick, Pegasus's ears on end, his nostrils quivering, my buggy thumping over thank-you-ma'ams, I would not be a city leech for a brown-stone front and a brass name-plate upon my door.
In some such pleasant hooky-hour in spring I had cast, sullenly enough, but was now humming to myself, in tune with Troublesome, when a twig snapped behind the willows. Some cow, thought I, and kept my eyes upon the stream. Another twig: I turned inquiringly. There, by the water-side, and all unmindful of my presence, was Letitia Primrose.
I bit my pipe clean through. I would have called at once, but something stopped me. She stood quietly by the brook, gazing at the stones on which it played and sang. Her shoulders drooped a little, her face seemed tired and pale. She turned and saw me.
"Bertram!" Her face was guilty.