"I am afraid that I am wofully obtuse," returned the doctor, with the air of a man who asks for a further explanation.
"From the hand of Chance," she answered briefly, "one gets little good, and much harm; from the hand of Providence, only good, however disguised. The difference is in the taking and the using."
She turned towards the window as she finished, with the air of who dismisses the subject.
Astra, meanwhile, stood gazing at the doctor with a most anxious, disturbed expression. She was beginning to understand too well that under many of his seemingly most careless utterances, there lurked a deep significance and design. In the tone of his last speech to her, there had been something which caused her a vague alarm.
"What did he mean?" she asked herself, wearily putting her hand to her brow,—"What did he mean?"
VII.
OVERBURDENED.
Carice Bergan was gifted with instincts singularly quick and delicate. She had not long breathed the same atmosphere with Astra and Doctor Remy before she felt it growing heavy around her with some intensity of emotion which she neither shared nor understood. It might be sympathy, it might be aversion; in either case, its effect was to make her feel confused and constrained, in their presence. At one moment, she seemed to behold them afar off, as it were, in a sphere of their own, whither she had neither the right nor the ability to follow them; at another, she felt herself standing between them, barring their way to a free and satisfactory interchange of thought and feeling; and again, she believed that Doctor Remy alone was responsible for her discomfort, interrupting, by his presence, the cordial flow of sympathy between Astra and herself. At any rate, it would be a relief to escape from so oppressive an atmosphere; accordingly, she took her departure, leaving the lovers—if such they can be called—together.
Certainly, there was nothing lover-like in the manner with which they faced each other, a few moments after the door had closed behind her. That brief interval had been spent by both in preparation for the crisis which the one knew, and the other felt, to be approaching. Astra awaited it with a mixture of eagerness and dread; she was weary of wearing the checkered tissue of suspense and anxiety; she would be glad to know exactly what was in store for her, even though the bitter fruit of such knowledge should be mortification and anguish. Doctor Remy's face was set and hard; over it a sombre emotion, like the gray shadow of a cloud on a rock, now and then passed swiftly, taking nothing from its sternness, but adding much to its gloom. He looked like a man who, at no slight cost to himself, has braced his soul with iron for the performance of some heavy, but necessary, task. Little as he likes it, he will carry it out pitilessly to the end.
With an inauspicious frown on his brow—none the less dark because it must have been assumed—he now opened the conversation by saying, abruptly;—