"I've heard of that too," said the doctor. "Well, beauty is a wonderful gift; that is, the transcendent beauty that every one acknowledges."
"And very rare," said Mary. "I should like to see the beauty every one would acknowledge. If this girl seemed as beautiful to every one as she does to you, I think she would have been advanced to a tobacconist's shop at least by this time."
"Don't speak of it!" said her brother.
V.
On the following day about the same hour Dr. Brunton approached the lodge where he had come so often full of pity, and had submitted to be bored with a good grace. But instead of dragging himself up to make this visit as a tiresome duty, which he had sometimes felt it to be, it had floated before his mind all day, and he went through the gate with the most vivid and even tremulous expectation and interest. But the celestial beauty in the amber beads was not there. He sat and listened patiently to the old woman's story, and various times tried to draw her out about her visitor of yesterday; but she was so occupied with herself that she could speak of nothing else, and he left with a stinging, empty sense of disappointment, as he did on the next day, and the next; but on the fourth the rustic beauty reappeared, as innocently simple and slightly sheepish in manner as before.
"You have not been here for some days?" the doctor said to her.
"Na, I couldna coom."
"Why not?"
"My faither said I was to bide in the house and mind my wark."
"What do you do? Can you read well?"