“Sir,” said he, with a strongly marked foreign accent, “your skill is so highly spoken of here that I expected to have seen an old man.”
“Sir,” I replied, “I have studied deeply, and am convinced of the importance of my station. You may place reliance in me.”
“Very well,” said he, “I commit my wife to your care, her present situation calls for some advice as well as precaution. Born far from here, she left home and friends to follow me, and I to guard and repay her have nothing but love—no experience. I rely upon you, sir, to keep her if possible from every suffering.”
And the young man as he spoke cast on his wife a look so full of love that her large blue eyes glistened with tears of gratitude. She dropped a child’s cap she was embroidering, and with both hands pressed the hand of her husband.
I beheld them, and should have found that their lot was enviable, but did not. I had often seen persons weep and called them happy. I saw Mr. Meredith and his wife smile, and yet could not repress the thought that they had their sorrows. I took a seat near my charming patient. Never have I seen aught as beautiful as that face covered with the long ringlets of her fair hair.
“How old, are you, madame?” I asked.
“Seventeen years.”
“And this distant country in which you were born, is the climate there very different from ours?”
“I was born in America, at New Orleans. Oh! the sun is brighter there.”
And fearing, doubtless, that she had expressed a regret, she added—