THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

I think I was as nearly mad as I could be; nearer madness, I believe, than I shall ever be again, thank God! Three weeks of it had driven me to the very verge of desperation. I cannot say here what had brought me to this pass, for I do not know into whose hands these pages may fall; but I had made up my mind to persist in a certain line of conduct which I firmly believed to be right, while those who had authority over me, and were stronger than I was, were resolutely bent upon making me submit to their will. The conflict had been going on, more or less violently, for months; now I had come very near the end of it. I felt that I must either yield or go mad. There was no chance of my dying; I was too strong for that. There was no other alternative than subjection or insanity.

It had been raining all the day long, in a ceaseless, driving torrent, which had kept the streets clear of passengers. I could see nothing but wet flag-stones, with little pools of water lodging in every hollow, in which the rain-drops splashed heavily whenever the storm grew more in earnest. Now and then a tradesman's cart, or a cab, with their drivers wrapped in mackintoshes, dashed past; and I watched them till they were out of my sight. It had been the dreariest of days. My eyes had followed the course of solitary drops rolling down the window-panes, until my head ached. Toward nightfall I could distinguish a low, wailing tone, moaning through the air; a quiet prelude to a coming change in the weather, which was foretold also by little rents in the thick mantle of cloud, which had shrouded the sky all day. The storm of rain was about to be succeeded by a storm of wind. Any change would be acceptable to me.

There was nothing within my room less dreary than without. I was in London, but in what part of London I did not know. The house was one of those desirable family residences, advertised in the Times as to be let furnished, and promising all the comforts and refinements of a home. It was situated in a highly-respectable, though not altogether fashionable quarter; as I judged by the gloomy, monotonous rows of buildings which I could see from my windows: none of which were shops, but all private dwellings. The people who passed up and down the streets on line days were all of one stamp, well-to-do persons, who could afford to wear good and handsome clothes; but who were infinitely less interesting than the dear, picturesque beggars of Italian towns, or the sprightly, well-dressed peasantry of French cities. The rooms on the third floor—my rooms, which I had not been allowed to leave since we entered the house, three weeks before—were very badly furnished, indeed, with comfortless, high horse-hair-seated chairs, and a sofa of the same uncomfortable material, cold and slippery, on which it was impossible to rest. The carpet was nearly threadbare, and the curtains of dark-red moreen were very dingy; the mirror over the chimney-piece seemed to have been made purposely to distort my features, and produce in me a feeling of depression. My bedroom, which communicated with this agreeable sitting-room by folding-doors, was still smaller and gloomier; and opened upon a dismal back-yard, where a dog in a kennel howled dejectedly from time to time, and rattled his chain, as if to remind me that I was a prisoner like himself. I had no books, no work, no music. It was a dreary place to pass a dreary time in; and my only resource was to pace to and fro—to and fro from one end to another of those wretched rooms.

I watched the day grow dusk, and then dark. The rifts in the driving clouds were growing larger, and the edges were torn. I left off roaming up and down my room, like some entrapped creature, and sank down on the floor by the window, looking out for the pale, sad blue of the sky which gleamed now and then through the clouds, till the night had quite set in. I did not cry, for I am not given to overmuch weeping, and my heart was too sore to be healed by tears; neither did I tremble, for I held out my hand and arm to make sure they were steady; but still I felt as if I were sinking down—down into an awful, profound despondency, from which I should never rally; it was all over with me. I had nothing before me but to give up, and own myself overmatched and conquered. I have a half-remembrance that as I crouched there in the darkness I sobbed once, and cried under my breath, "God help me!"

A very slight sound grated on my ear, and a fresh thrill of strong, resentful feeling quivered all through me; it was the hateful click of the key turning in the lock. It gave me force enough to carry out my defiance a little longer. Before the door could be opened I sprang to my feet, and stood erect, and outwardly very calm, gazing through the window, with my face turned away from the persons who were coming in; I was so placed that I could see them reflected in the mirror over the fireplace. A servant came first, carrying in a tray, upon which were a lamp and my tea—such a meal as might be prepared for a school-girl in disgrace.

She came up to me, as if to draw down the blinds and close the shutters.

"Leave them," I said; "I will do it myself by-and-by."

"He's not coming home to-night," said a woman's voice behind me, in a scoffing tone.

I could see her too without turning round. A handsome woman, with bold black eyes, and a rouged face, which showed coarsely in the ugly looking-glass. She was extravagantly dressed, and wore a profusion of ornaments—tawdry ones, mostly, but one or two I recognized as my own. She was not many years older than myself. I took no notice whatever of her, or her words, or her presence; but continued to gaze out steadily at the lamp-lit streets and stormy sky. Her voice grew hoarse with passion, and I knew well how her face would burn and flush under the rouge.

"It will be no better for you when he is at home," she said, fiercely. "He hates you; he swears so a hundred times a day, and he is determined to break your proud spirit for you. We shall force you to knock under sooner or later; and I warn you it will be best for you to be sooner rather than later. What friends have you got anywhere to take your side? If you'd made friends with me, my fine lady, you'd have found it good for yourself; but you've chosen to make me your enemy, and I'll make him your enemy. You know, as well as I do, he can't hear the sight of your long, puling face."

Still I did not answer by word or sign. I set my teeth together, and gave no indication that I had heard one of her taunting speeches. My silence only served to fan her fury.

"Upon my soul, madam," she almost shrieked, "you are enough to drive me to murder! I could beat you, standing there so dumb, as if I was not worthy to speak a word to. Ay! and I would, but for him. So, then, three weeks of this hasn't broken you down yet! but you are only making it the worse for yourself; we shall try other means to-morrow."

She had no idea how nearly my spirit was broken, for I gave her no reply. She came up to where I stood, and shook her clinched hand in my face—a large, well-shaped hand, with bejewelled fingers, that could have given me a heavy blow. Her face was dark with passion; yet she was maintaining some control over herself, though with great difficulty. She had never struck me yet, but I trembled and shrank from her, and was thankful when she flung herself out of the room, pulling the door violently after her, and locking it noisily, as if the harsh, jarring sounds would be more terrifying than the tones of her own voice.

Left to myself I turned round to the light, catching a fresh glimpse of my face in the mirror—a pale and sadder and more forlorn face than before. I almost hated myself in that glass. But I was hungry, for I was young, and my health and appetite were very good; and I sat down to my plain fare, and ate it heartily. I felt stronger and in better spirits by the time I had finished the meal; I resolved to brave it out a little longer. The house was very quiet; for at present there was no one in it except the woman and the servant who had been up to my room. The servant was a poor London drudge, who was left in charge by the owners of the house, and who had been forbidden to speak to me. After a while I heard her heavy, shambling footsteps coming slowly up the staircase, and passing my door on her way to the attics above; they sounded louder than usual, and I turned my head round involuntarily. A thin, fine streak of light, no thicker than a thread, shone for an instant in the dark corner of the wall close by the door-post, but it died away almost before I saw it. My heart stood still for a moment, and then beat like a hammer. I stole very softly to the door, and discovered that the bolt had slipped beyond the hoop of the lock; probably in the sharp bang with which it had been closed. The door was open for me!

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

TO SOUTHAMPTON.

There was not a moment to be lost. When the servant came downstairs again from her room in the attics, she would be sure to call for the tea-tray, in order to save herself another journey; how long she would be up-stairs was quite uncertain. If she was gone to "clean" herself, as she called it, the process might be a very long one, and a good hour might be at my disposal; but I could not count upon that. In the drawing-room below sat my jailer and enemy, who might take a whim into her head, and come up to see her prisoner at any instant. It was necessary to be very quick, very decisive, and very silent.

I had been on the alert for such a chance ever since my imprisonment began. My seal-skin hat and jacket lay ready to my hand in a drawer; but I could find no gloves; I could not wait for gloves. Already there were ominous sounds overhead, as if the servant had dispatched her brief business there, and was about to come down. I had not time to put on thicker boots; and it was perhaps essential to the success of my flight to steal down the stairs in the soft, velvet slippers I was wearing. I stepped as lightly as I could—lightly but very swiftly, for the servant was at the top of the upper flight, while I had two to descend. I crept past the drawing-room door. The heavy house-door opened with a grating of the hinges; but I stood outside it, in the shelter of the portico; free, but with the rain and wind of a stormy night in October beating against me, and with no light save the glimmer of the feeble street-lamps flickering across the wet pavement.

I knew very well that my escape was almost hopeless, for the success of it depended very much upon which road of the three lying before me I should happen to take. I had no idea of the direction of any one of them, for I had never been out of the house since the night I was brought to it. The strong, quick running of the servant, and the passionate fury of the woman, would overtake me if we were to have a long race; and if they overtook me they would force me back. I had no right to seek freedom in this wild way, yet it was the only way. Even while I hesitated in the portico of the house that ought to have been my home, I heard the shrill scream of the girl within when she found my door open, and my room empty. If I did not decide instantaneously, and decide aright, it would have been better for me never to have tried this chance of escape.

But I did not linger another moment. I could almost believe an angel took me by the hand, and led me. I darted straight across the muddy road, getting my thin slippers wet through at once, ran for a few yards, and then turned sharply round a corner into a street at the end of which I saw the cheery light of shop-windows, all in a glow in spite of the rain. On I fled breathlessly, unhindered by any passer-by, for the rain was still falling, though more lightly. As I drew nearer to the shop-windows, an omnibus-driver, seeing me run toward him, pulled up his horses in expectation of a passenger. The conductor shouted some name which I did not hear, but I sprang in, caring very little where it might carry me, so that I could get quickly enough and far enough out of the reach of my pursuers. There had been no time to lose, and none was lost. The omnibus drove on again quickly, and no trace was left of me.

I sat quite still in the farthest corner of the omnibus, hardly able to recover my breath after my rapid running. I was a little frightened at the notice the two or three other passengers appeared to take of me, and I did my best to seem calm and collected. My ungloved hands gave me some trouble, and I hid them as well as I could in the folds of my dress; for there was something remarkable about the want of gloves in any one as well dressed as I was. But nobody spoke to me, and one after another they left the omnibus, and fresh persons took their places, who did not know where I had got in. I did not stir, for I determined to go as far as I could in this conveyance. But all the while I was wondering what I should do with myself, and where I could go, when it readied its destination.

There was one trifling difficulty immediately ahead of me. When the omnibus stopped I should have no small change for paying my fare. There was an Australian sovereign fastened to my watch-chain which I could take off, but it would be difficult to detach it while we were jolting on. Besides, I dreaded to attract attention to myself. Yet what else could I do?

Before I had settled this question, which occupied me so fully that I forgot other and more serious difficulties, the omnibus drove into a station-yard, and every passenger, inside and out, prepared to alight. I lingered till the last, and sat still till I had unfastened my gold-piece. The wind drove across the open space in a strong gust as I stepped down upon the pavement. A man had just descended from the roof, and was paying the conductor: a tall, burly man, wearing a thick water-proof coat, and a seaman's hat of oil-skin, with a long flap lying over the back of his neck. His face was brown and weather-beaten, but he had kindly-looking eyes, which glanced at me as I stood waiting to pay my fare.

"Going down to Southampton?" said the conductor to him.

"Ay, and beyond Southampton," he answered.

"You'll have a rough night of it," said the conductor.—"Sixpence, if you please, miss."

I offered him my Australian sovereign, which he turned over curiously, asking me if I had no smaller change. He grumbled when I answered no, and the stranger, who had not passed on, but was listening to what was said, turned pleasantly to me.

"You have no change, mam'zelle?" he asked, speaking rather slowly, as if English was not his ordinary speech. "Very well! are you going to Southampton?"

"Yes, by the next train," I answered, deciding upon that course without hesitation.

"So am I, mam'zelle," he said, raising his hand to his oil-skin cap; "I will pay this sixpence, and you can give it me again, when you buy your ticket in the office."

I smiled quickly, gladly; and he smiled back upon me, but gravely, as if his face was not used to a smile. I passed on into the station, where a train was standing, and people hurrying about the platform, choosing their carriages. At the ticket-office they changed my Australian gold-piece without a word; and I sought out my seaman friend to return the sixpence he had paid to me. He had done me a greater kindness than he could ever know, and I thanked him heartily. His honest, deep-set, blue eyes glistened under their shaggy eyebrows as they looked down upon me.

"Can I do nothing more for you, mam'zelle?" he asked. "Shall I see after your luggage?"

"Oh! that will be all right, thank you," I replied, "but is this the train for Southampton, and how soon will it start?"

I was watching anxiously the stream of people going to and fro, lest I should see some person who knew me. Yet who was there in London who could know me?

"It will be off in five minutes," answered the seaman. "Shall I look out a carriage for you?"

He was somewhat careful in making his selection; finally he put me into a compartment where there were only two ladies, and he stood in front of the door, but with his back turned toward it, until the train was about to start. Then he touched his hat again with a gesture of farewell, and ran away to a second-class carriage.

I sighed with satisfaction as the train rushed swiftly through the dimly-lighted suburbs of London, and entered upon the open country. A wan, watery line of light lay under the brooding clouds in the west, tinged with a lurid hue; and all the great field of sky stretching above the level landscape was overcast with storm-wrack, fleeing swiftly before the wind. At times the train seemed to shake with the Wast, when it was passing oyer any embankment more than ordinarily exposed; but it sped across the country almost as rapidly as the clouds across the sky. No one in the carriage spoke. Then came over me that weird feeling familiar to all travellers, that one has been doomed to travel thus through many years, and has not half accomplished the time. I felt as if I had been fleeing from my home, and those who should have been my friends, for a long and weary while; yet it was scarcely an hour since I had made my escape.

In about two hours or more—but exactly what time I did not know, for my watch had stopped—my fellow-passengers, who had scarcely condescended to glance at me, alighted at a large, half-deserted station, where only a few lamps were burning. Through the window I could see that very few other persons were leaving the train, and I concluded we had not yet reached the terminus. A porter came up to me as I leaned my head through the window.

"Going on, miss?" he asked.

"Oh, yes!" I answered, shrinking back into my corner-seat. He remained upon the step, with his arm over the window-frame, while the train moved on at a slackened pace for a few minutes, and then pulled up, but at no station. Before me lay a dim, dark, indistinct scene, with little specks of light twinkling here and there in the night, but whether on sea or shore I could not tell. Immediately opposite the train stood the black hulls and masts and funnels of two steamers, with a glimmer of lanterns on their decks, and up and down their shrouds. The porter opened the door for me.

"You've only to go on board, miss," he said, "your luggage will be seen to all right." And he hurried away to open the doors of the other carriages.

I stood still, utterly bewildered, for a minute or two, with the wind tossing my hair about, and the rain beating in sharp, stinging drops like hailstones upon my face and hands. It must have been close upon midnight, and there was no light but the dim, glow-worm glimmer of the lanterns on deck. Every one was hurrying past me. I began almost to repent of the desperate step I had taken; but I had learned already that there is no possibility of retracing one's steps. At the gangways of the two vessels there were men shouting hoarsely. "This way for the Channel Islands!" "This way for Havre and Paris!" To which boat should I trust myself and my fate? There was nothing to guide me. Yet once more that night the moment had come when I was compelled to make a prompt, decisive, urgent choice. It was almost a question of life and death to me: a leap in the dark that must be taken. My great terror was lest my place of refuge should be discovered, and I be forced back again. Where was I to go? To Paris, or to the Channel Islands?

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

A ROUGH NIGHT AT SEA.

A mere accident decided it. Near the fore-part of the train I saw the broad, tall figure of my new friend, the seaman, making his way across to the boat for the Channel Islands; and almost involuntarily I made up my mind to go on board the same steamer, for I had an instinctive feeling that he would prove a real friend, if I had need of one. He did not see me following; no doubt he supposed I had left the train at Southampton, having only taken my ticket so far; though how I had missed Southampton I could not tell. The deck was wet and slippery, and the confusion upon it was very great. I was too much at home upon a steamer to need any directions; and I went down immediately into the ladies' cabin, which was almost empty, and chose a berth for myself in the darkest corner. It was not far from the door, and presently two other ladies came down, with a gentleman and the captain, and held an anxious parley close to me. I listened absently and mechanically, as indifferent to the subject as if it could be of no consequence to me.

"Is there any danger?" asked one of the ladies.

"Well, I cannot say positively there will be no danger," answered the captain; "there's not danger enough to keep me and the crew in port; but it will be a very dirty night in the Channel. If there's no actual necessity for crossing to-night I should advise you to wait, and see how it will be to-morrow. Of course we shall use extra caution, and all that sort of thing. No; I cannot say I expect any great danger."

"But it will be awfully rough?" said the gentleman.

The captain answered only by a sound between a groan and a whistle, as if he could not trust himself to think of words that would describe the roughness. There could be no doubt of his meaning. The ladies hastily determined to drive back to their hotel, and gathered up their small packages and wrappings quickly. I fancied they were regarding me somewhat curiously, but I kept my face away from them carefully. They could only see my seal-skin jacket and hat, and my rough hair; and they did not speak to me.

"You are going to venture, miss?" said the captain, stepping into the cabin as the ladies retreated up the steps.

"Oh, yes," I answered. "I am obliged to go, and I am not in the least afraid."

"You needn't be," he replied, in a hearty voice. "We shall do our best, for our own sakes, and you would be our first care if there was any mishap. Women and children first always. I will send the stewardess to you; she goes, of course."

I sat down on one of the couches, listening for a few minutes to the noises about me. The masts were groaning, and the planks creaking under the heavy tramp of the sailors, as they got ready to start, with shrill cries to one another. Then the steam-engine began to throb like a pulse through all the vessel from stem to stern. Presently the stewardess came down, and recommended me to lie down in my berth at once, which I did very obediently, but silently, for I did not wish to enter into conversation with the woman, who seemed inclined to be talkative. She covered me up well with several blankets, and there I lay with my face turned from the light of the swinging lamp, and scarcely moved hand or foot throughout the dismal and stormy night.

For it was very stormy and dismal as soon as we were out of Southampton waters, and in the rush and swirl of the Channel. I did not fall asleep for an instant. I do not suppose I should have slept had the Channel been, as it is sometimes, smooth as a mill-pond, and there had been no clamorous hissing and booming of waves against the frail planks, which I could touch with my hand. I could see nothing of the storm, but I could hear it: and the boat seemed tossed, like a mere cockle-shell, to and fro upon the rough sea. It did not alarm me so much as it distracted my thoughts, and kept them from dwelling upon possibilities far more perilous to me than the danger of death by shipwreck. A short suffering such a death would be.

My escape and flight had been so unexpected, so unhoped for, that it had bewildered me, and it was almost a pleasure to lie still and listen to the din and uproar of the sea and the swoop of the wind rushing down upon it. Was I myself or no? Was this nothing more than a very coherent, very vivid dream, from which I should awake by-and-by to find myself a prisoner still, a creature as wretched and friendless as any that the streets of London contained? My flight had been too extraordinary a success, so far, for my mind to be able to dwell upon it calmly.

I watched the dawn break through a little port-hole opening upon my berth, which had been washed and beaten by the water all the night long. The level light shone across the troubled and leaden-colored surface of the sea, which seemed to grow a little quieter under its touch. I had fancied during the night that the waves were running mountains high; but now I could see them, they only rolled to and fro in round, swelling hillocks, dull green against the eastern sky, with deep, sullen troughs of a livid purple between them. But the fury of the storm had spent itself, that was evident, and the steamer was making way steadily now.

The stewardess had gone away early in the night, being frightened to death, she said, to seek more genial companionship than mine. So I was alone, with the blending light of the early dawn and that of the lamp burning feebly from the ceiling. I sat up in my berth and cautiously unstitched the lining in the breast of my jacket. Here, months ago, when I first began to foresee this emergency, and while I was still allowed the use of my money, I had concealed one by one a few five-pound notes of the Bank of England. I counted them over, eight of them; forty pounds in all, my sole fortune, my only means of living. True, I had besides these a diamond ring, presented to me under circumstances which made it of no value to me, except for its worth in money, and a watch and chain given to me years ago by my father. A jeweller had told me that the ring was worth sixty pounds, and the watch and chain forty; but how difficult and dangerous it would be for me to sell either of them! Practically my means were limited to the eight bank-notes of five pounds each. I kept out one for the payment of my passage, and then replaced the rest, and carefully pinned them into the unstitched lining.

Then I began to wonder what my destination was. I knew nothing whatever of the Channel Islands, except the names which I had learned at school—Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark. I repeated these over and over again to myself; but which of them we were bound for, or if we were about to call at each one of them, I did not know. I should have been more at home had I gone to Paris.

As the light grew I became restless, and at last I left my berth and ventured to climb the cabin-steps. The fresh air smote upon me almost painfully. There was no rain falling, and the wind had been lulling since the dawn. The sea itself was growing brighter, and glittered here and there in spots where the sunlight fell upon it. All the sailors looked beaten and worn out with the night's toil, and the few passengers who had braved the passage, and were now well enough to come on deck, were weary and sallow-looking. There was still no land in sight, for the clouds hung low on the horizon, and overhead the sky was often overcast and gloomy. It was so cold that, in spite of my warm mantle, I shivered from head to foot.

But I could not bear to go back to the close, ill-smelling cabin, which had been shut up all night. I stayed on deck in the biting wind, leaning over the wet bulwarks and gazing across the desolate sea till my spirits sank like lead. The reaction upon the violent strain on my nerves was coming, and I had no power to resist its influence. I could feel the tears rolling down my cheeks and falling on my hands without caring to wipe them away; the more so as there was no one to see them. What did my tears signify to any one? I was cold, and hungry, and miserable. How lonely I was! how poor! with neither a home nor a friend in the world!—a mere castaway upon the waves of this troublous life!

"Mam'zelle is a brave sailor," said a voice behind me, which I recognized as my seaman of the night before, whom I had wellnigh forgotten; "but the storm is over now, and we shall be in port only an hour or two behind time."

"What port shall we reach?" I asked, not caring to turn round lest he should see my wet eyes and cheeks.

"St. Peter-Port," he answered. "Mam'zelle, then, does not know our islands?"

"No," I said. "Where is St. Peter-Port?"

"In Guernsey," he replied. "Is mam'zelle going to Guernsey or Jersey? Jersey is about two hours' sail from Guernsey. If you were going to land at St. Peter-Port, I might be of some service to you."

I turned round then, and looked at him steadily. His voice was a very pleasant one, full of tones that went straight to my heart and filled me with confidence. His face did not give the lie to it, or cause me any disappointment. He was no gentleman, that was plain; his face was bronzed and weather-beaten, as if he often encountered rough weather. But his deep-set eyes had a steadfast, quiet power in them, and his mouth, although it was almost hidden by hair, had a pleasant curve about it. I could not guess how old he was; he looked a middle-aged man to me. His great, rough hands, which had never worn gloves, were stained and hard with labor; and he had evidently been taking a share in the toil of the night, for his close-fitting, woven blue jacket was wet through, and his hair was damp and rough with the wind and rain. He raised his cap as my eyes looked straight into his, and a faint smile flitted across his grave face.

"I want," I said, suddenly, "to find a place where I can live very cheaply. I have not much money, and I must make it last a long time. I do not mind how quiet the place, or how poor; the quieter the better for me. Can you tell me of such a place?"

"You would want a place fit for a lady?" he said, in a half-questioning tone, and with a glance at my silk dress.

"No," I answered, eagerly. "I mean such a cottage as you would live in. I would do all my own work, for I am very poor, and I do not know yet how I can get my living. I must be very careful of my money till I find out what I can do. What sort of a place do you and your wife live in?"

His face was clouded a little, I thought; and he did not answer me till after a short silence.

"My poor little wife is dead," he answered, "and I do not live in Guernsey or Jersey. We live in Sark, my mother and I. I am a fisherman, but I have also a little farm, for with us the land goes from the father to the eldest son, and I was the eldest. It is true we have one room to spare, which might do for mam'zelle; but the island is far away, and very triste. Jersey is gay, and so is Guernsey, but in the winter Sark is too mournful."

"It will be just the place I want," I said, eagerly; "it would suit me exactly. Can you let me go there at once? Will you take me with you?"

"Mam'zelle," he replied, smiling, "the room must be made ready for you, and I must speak to my mother. Besides, Sark is six miles from Guernsey, and to-day the passage would be too rough for you. If God sends us fair weather I will come back to St. Peter-Port for you in three days. My name is Tardif. You can ask the people in Peter-Port what sort of a man Tardif of the Havre Gosselin is."

"I do not want any one to tell me what sort of a man you are," I said, holding out my hand, red and cold with the keen air. He took it into his large, rough palm, looking down upon me with an air of friendly protection.

"What is your name, mam'zelle?" he inquired.

"Oh! my name is Olivia," I said; then I stopped abruptly, for there flashed across me the necessity for concealing it. Tardif did not seem to notice my embarrassment.

"There are some Olliviers in St. Peter-Port," he said. "Is mam'zelle of the same family? But no, that is not probable."

"I have no relations," I answered, "not even in England. I have very few friends, and they are all far away in Australia. I was born there, and lived there till I was seventeen."'

The tears sprang to my eyes again, and my new friend saw them, but said nothing. He moved off at once to the far end of the dock, to help one of the crew in some heavy piece of work. He did not come hack until the rain began to return—a fine, drizzling rain, which came in scuds across the sea.

"Mam'zelle," he said, "you ought to go below; and I will tell you when we are in sight of Guernsey."

I went below, inexpressibly more satisfied and comforted. What it was in this man that won my complete, unquestioning confidence, I did not know; but his very presence, and the sight of his good, trustworthy face, gave me a sense of security such as I have never felt before or since. Surely God had sent him to me in my great extremity.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

A SAFE HAVEN.

We were two hours after time at St. Peter-Port; and then all was hurry and confusion, for goods and passengers had to be landed and embarked for Jersey. Tardif, who was afraid of losing the cutter which would convey him to Sark, had only time to give me the address of a person with whom I could lodge until he came to fetch me to his island, and then he hastened away to a distant part of the quay. I was not sorry that he should miss finding out that I had no luggage of any kind with me.

I was busy enough during the next three days, for I had every thing to buy. The widow with whom I was lodging came to the conclusion that I had lost all my luggage, and I did not try to remove the false impression. Through her assistance I was able to procure all I required, without exciting more notice and curiosity. My purchases, though they were as simple and cheap as I could make them, drew largely upon my small store of money, and as I saw it dwindling away, while I grudged every shilling I was obliged to part with, my spirits sank lower and lower. I had never known the dread of being short of money, and the new experience was, perhaps, the more terrible to me. There was no chance of disposing of the costly dress in which I had journeyed, without arousing too much attention and running too great a risk. I stayed in-doors as much as possible, and, as the weather continued cold and gloomy, I did not meet many persons when I ventured out into the narrow, foreign-looking streets of the town.

But on the third day, when I looked out from my window, I saw that the sky had cleared, and the sun was shining joyously. It was one of those lovely days which come as a lull sometimes in the midst of the equinoctial gales, as if they were weary of the havoc they had made, and were resting with folded wings. For the first time I saw the little island of Sark lying against the eastern sky. The whole length of it was visible, from north to south, with the waves beating against its headlands, and a fringe of silvery foam girdling it. The sky was of a pale blue, as though the rains had washed it as well as the earth, and a few filmy clouds were still lingering about it. The sea beneath was a deeper blue, with streaks almost like a hoar frost upon it, with here and there tints of green, like that of the sky at sunset. A boat with three white sails, which were reflected in the water, was tacking about to enter the harbor, and a second, with amber sails, was a little way behind, but following quickly in its wake. I watched them for a long time. Was either of them Tardif's boat?

That question was answered in about two hours' time by Tardif's appearance at the house. He lifted my little box on to his broad shoulders, and marched away with it, trying vainly to reduce his long strides into steps that would suit me, as I walked beside him. I felt overjoyed that he was come. So long as I was in Guernsey, when every morning I could see the arrival of the packet that had brought me, I could not shake off the fear that it was bringing some one in pursuit of me; but in Sark that would be all different. Besides, I felt instinctively that this man would protect me, and take my part to the very utmost, should any circumstances arise that compelled me to appeal to him and trust him with my secret. I knew nothing of him, but his face was stamped with God's seal of trustworthiness, if ever a human face was.

A second man was in the boat when we reached it, and it looked well laden. Tardif made a comfortable seat for me amid the packages, and then the sails were unfurled, and we were off quickly out of the harbor and on the open sea.

A low, westerly wind was blowing, and fell upon the sails with a strong and equal pressure. We rode before it rapidly, skimming over the low, crested waves almost without a motion. Never before had I felt so perfectly secure upon the water. Now I could breathe freely, with the sense of assured safety growing stronger every moment as the coast of Guernsey receded on the horizon, and the rocky little island grew nearer. As we approached it no landing-place was to be seen, no beach or strand. An iron-bound coast of sharp and rugged crags confronted us, which it seemed impossible to scale. At last we cast anchor at the foot of a great cliff, rising sheer out of the sea, where a ladder hung down the face of the rock for a few feet. A wilder or lonelier place I had never seen. Nobody could pursue and surprise me here.

The boatman who was with us climbed up the ladder, and, kneeling down, stretched out his hand to help me, while Tardif stood waiting to hold me steadily on the damp and slippery rungs. For a moment I hesitated, and looked round at the crags, and the tossing, restless sea.

"I could carry you through the water, mam'zelle," said Tardif, pointing to a hand's breadth of shingle lying between the rocks, "but you will get wet. It will be better for you to mount up here."

I fastened both of my hands tightly round one of the upper rungs, before lifting my feet from the unsteady prow of the boat. But the ladder once climbed, the rest of the ascent was easy. I walked on up a zigzag path, cut in the face of the cliff, until I gained the summit, and sat down to wait for Tardif and his comrade. I could not have fled to a securer hiding-place. So long as my money held out, I might live as peacefully and safely as any fugitive had ever lived.

For a little while I sat looking out at the wild and beautiful scene before me, which no words can tell and no fancy picture to those who have never seen it. The white foam of the waves was so near, that I could see the rainbow colors playing through the bubbles as the sun shone on them. Below the clear water lay a girdle of sunken rocks, pointed as needles, and with edges as sharp as swords, about which the waves fretted ceaselessly, drawing silvery lines about their notched and dented ridges. The cliffs ran up precipitously from the sea, carved grotesquely over their whole surface into strange and fantastic shapes; while the golden and gray lichens embroidered them richly, and bright sea-flowers, and stray tufts of grass, lent them the most vivid and gorgeous hues. Beyond the channel, against the clear western sky, lay the island of Guernsey, rising like a purple mountain out of the opal sea, which lay like a lake between us, sparkling and changing every minute under the light of the afternoon sun.

But there was scarcely time for the exquisite beauty of this scene to sink deeply into my heart just then. Before long I heard the tramp of Tardif and his comrade following me; their heavy tread sent down the loose stones on the path plunging into the sea. They were both laden with part of the boat's cargo. They stopped to rest for a minute or two at the spot where I had sat down, and the other boatman began talking earnestly to Tardif in his patois, of which I did not understand a word. Tardif's face was very grave and sad, indescribably so; and, before he turned to me and spoke, I knew it was some sorrowful catastrophe he had to tell.

"You see how smooth it is, mam'zelle," he said—"how clear and beautiful—down below us, where the waves are at play like little white children? I love them, but they are cruel and treacherous. While I was away there was an accident down yonder, just beyond these rocks. Our doctor, and two gentlemen, and a sailor went out from our little bay below, and shortly after there came on a thick darkness, with heavy rain, and they were all lost, every one of them! Poor Renouf! he was a good friend of mine. And our doctor, too! If I had been here, maybe I might have persuaded them not to brave it."

It was a sad story to hear, yet just then I did not pay much attention to it. I was too much engrossed in my own difficulties and trouble. So far as my experience goes, I believe the heart is more open to other people's sorrows when it is free from burdens of its own. I was glad when Tardif took up his load again and turned his back upon the sea.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

WILL IT DO?

Tardif walked on before me to a low, thatched cottage, standing at the back of a small farm-yard. There was no other dwelling in sight, and even the sea was not visible from it. It was sheltered by the steep slope of a hill rising behind it, and looked upon another slope covered with gorse-bushes; a very deep and narrow ravine ran down from it to the hand-breadth of shingle which I had seen from the boat. A more solitary place I could not have imagined; no sign of human life, or its neighborhood, betrayed itself; overhead was a vast dome of sky, with a few white-winged sea-gulls flitting across it, and uttering their low, wailing cry. The roof of sky and the two round outlines of the little hills, and the deep, dark ravine, the end of which was unseen, formed the whole of the view before me.

I felt chilled a little as I followed Tardif down into the dell. He glanced back, with grave, searching eyes, scanning my face carefully. I tried to smile, with a very faint, wan smile, I suppose, for the lightness had fled from my spirits, and my heart was heavy enough, God knows.

"Will it not do, mam'zelle?" he asked, anxiously, and with his slow, solemn utterance; "it is not a place that will do for a young lady like you, is it? I should have counselled you to go on to Jersey, where there is more life and gayety; it is my home, but for you it will be nothing but a dull prison."

"No, no!" I answered, as the recollection of the prison I had fled from flashed across me; "it is a very pretty place and very safe; by-and-by I shall like it as much as you do, Tardif."

The house was a low, picturesque building, with thick walls of stone and a thatched roof, which had two little dormer-windows in it; but at the most sheltered end, farthest from the ravine that led down to the sea, there had been built a small, square room of brick-work. As we entered the fold-yard, Tardif pointed this room out to me as mine.

"I built it," he said, softly, "for my poor little wife; I brought the bricks over from Guernsey in my own boat, and laid nearly every one of them with my own hands; she died in it, mam'zelle. Please God, you will be both happy and safe there!"

We stepped directly from the stone causeway of the yard into the farm-house kitchen—the only sitting-room in the house except my own. It was exquisitely clean, with that spotless and scrupulous cleanliness which appears impossible in houses where there are carpets and curtains, and papered walls. An old woman, very little and bent, and dressed in an odd and ugly costume, met us at the door, dropping a courtesy to me, and looking at me with dim, watery eyes. I was about to speak to her, when Tardif bent down his head, and put his mouth to her ear, shouting to her with a loud voice, but in their peculiar jargon, of which I could not make out a single word.

"My poor mother is deaf," he said to me, "very deaf; neither can she speak English. Most of the young people in Sark can talk in English a little, but she is old and too deaf to learn. She has only once been off the island."

I looked at her, wondering for a moment what she could have to think of, but, with an intelligible gesture of welcome, she beckoned me into my own room. The aspect of it was somewhat dreary; the walls were of bare plaster, but dazzlingly white, with one little black silhouette of a woman's head hanging in a common black frame over the low, open hearth, on which a fire of seaweed was smouldering, with a quantity of gray ashes round the small centre of smoking embers. There was a little round table, uncovered, but as white as snow, and two chairs, one of them an arm-chair, and furnished with cushions. A four-post bedstead, with curtains of blue and white check, occupied the larger portion of the floor.

It was not a luxurious apartment; and for an instant I could hardly realize the fact that it was to be my home for an indefinite period. Some efforts had evidently been made to give it a look of welcome, homely as it was. A pretty china tea cup and saucer, with a plate or two to match, were set out on the deal table, and the cushioned arm-chair had been drawn forward to the hearth. I sat down in it, and buried my face in my hands, thinking, till Tardif knocked at the door, and carried in my trunk.

"Will it do, mam'zelle?" he asked, "will it do?"

"It will do very nicely, Tardif," I answered; "but how ever am I to talk to your mother if she does not know English?"

"Mam'zelle," he said, as he uncorded my trunk, "you must order me as you would a servant. Through the winter I shall always be at hand; and you will soon be used to us and our ways, and we shall be used to you and your ways. I will do my best for you, mam'zelle; trust me, I will study to do my best, and make you very happy here. I will be ready to take you away whenever you desire to go. Look upon me as your hired servant."

He waited upon me all the evening, but with a quick attention to my wants, which I had never met with in any hired servant. It was not unfamiliar to me, for in my own country I had often been served only by men; and especially during my girlhood, when I had lived far away in the country, upon my father's sheep-walk. I knew it was Tardif who fried the fish which came in with my tea; and, when the night closed in, it was he who trimmed the oil-lamp and brought it in, and drew the check curtains across the low casement, as if there were prying eyes to see me on the opposite bank. Then a deep, deep stillness crept over the solitary place—a stillness strangely deeper than that even of the daytime. The wail of the sea-gulls died away, and the few busy cries of the farm-yard ceased; the only sound that broke the silence was a muffled, hollow boom which came up the ravine from the sea.

Before nine o'clock Tardif and his mother had gone up-stairs to their rooms in the thatch; and I lay wearied but sleepless in my bed, listening to these dull, faint, ceaseless murmurs, as a child listens to the sound of the sea in a shell. Was it possible that it was I, myself, the Olivia who had been so loved and cherished in her girlhood, and so hated and tortured in later years, who was come to live under a fisherman's roof, in an island, the name of which I barely knew four days ago?

I fell asleep at last, yet I awoke early; but not so early that the other inmates of the cottage were not up, and about their day's work. It was my wish to wait upon myself, and so diminish the cost of living with these secluded people; but I found it was not to be so; Tardif waited upon me assiduously, as well as his deaf mother. The old woman would not suffer me to do any work in my own room, but put me quietly upon one side when I began to make my bed. Fortunately I had plenty of sewing to employ myself in; for I had taken care not to waste my money by buying ready-made clothes. The equinoctial gales came on again fiercely the day after I had reached Sark; and I stitched away from morning till night, trying to fix my thoughts upon my mechanical work.

When the first week was over, Tardif's mother came to me at a time when her son was away out-of-doors, with a purse in her fingers, and by very plain signs made me understand that it was time I paid the first instalment of my debt to her for board and lodgings. I was anxious about my money. No agreement had been made between us as to what I was to pay. I laid a sovereign down upon the table, and the old woman looked at it carefully, and with a pleased expression; but she put it in her purse, and walked away with it, giving me no change. Not that I altogether expected any change; they provided me with every thing I needed, and waited upon me with very careful service; yet now I could calculate exactly how long I should be safe in this refuge, and the calculation gave me great uneasiness. In a few months I should find myself still in need of refuge, but without the means of paying for it. What would become of me then?

Very slowly the winter wore on. How shall I describe the peaceful monotony, the dull, lonely safety of those dark days and long nights? I had been violently tossed from a life of extreme trouble and peril into a profound, unbroken, sleepy security. At first the sudden change stupefied me; but after a while there came over me an uneasy restlessness, a longing to get away from the silence and solitude, even if it were into insecurity and danger. I began to wonder how the world beyond the little island was going on. No news reached us from without. Sometimes for weeks together it was impossible for an open boat to cross over to Guernsey; even when a cutter accomplished its voyage out and in, no letters could arrive for me. The season was so far advanced when I went to Sark, that those visitors who had been spending a portion of the summer there had already taken their departure, leaving the islanders to themselves. They were sufficient for themselves; they and their own affairs formed the world. Tardif would bring home almost daily little scraps of news about the other families scattered about Sark; but of the greater affairs of life in other countries he could tell me nothing.

Yet why should I call these greater affairs? Each to himself is the centre of the world. It was a more important thing to me that I was safe, than that the freedom of England itself should be secure.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

TOO MUCH ALONE.

Yet looking back upon that time, now it is past, and has "rounded itself into that perfect star I saw not when I dwelt therein," it would be untrue to represent myself as in any way unhappy. At times I wished earnestly that I had been born among these people, and could live forever among them.

By degrees I discovered that Tardif led a somewhat solitary life himself, even in this solitary island, with its scanty population. There was an ugly church standing in as central and prominent a situation as possible, but Tardif and his mother did not frequent it. They belonged to a little knot of dissenters, who met for worship in a small room, when Tardif generally took the lead. For this reason a sort of coldness existed between him and the larger portion of his fellow-islanders. But there was a second and more important cause for a slight estrangement. He had married an Englishwoman many years ago, much to the astonishment and disappointment of his neighbors; and since her death he had held himself aloof from all the good women who would have been glad enough to undertake the task of consoling him for her loss. Tardif, therefore, was left very much to himself in his isolated cottage, and his mother's deafness caused her also to be no very great favorite with any of the gossips of the island. It was so difficult to make her understand any thing that could not be expressed by signs, that no one except her son attempted to tell her the small topics of the day.

All this told upon me, and my standing among them. At first I met a few curious glances as I roamed about the island; but my dress was as poor and plain as any of theirs, and I suppose there was nothing in my appearance, setting aside my dress, which could attract them. I learned afterward that Tardif had told those who asked him that my name was Ollivier, and they jumped to the conclusion that I belonged to a family of that name in Guernsey; this shielded me from the curiosity that might otherwise have been troublesome and dangerous. I was nobody but a poor young woman from Guernsey, who was lodging in the spare room of Tardif's cottage.

I set myself to grow used to their mode of life, and if possible to become so useful to them that, when my money was all spent, they might be willing to keep me with them; for I shrank from the thought of the time when I must be thrust out of this nest, lonely and silent as it was. As the long, dismal nights of winter set in, with the wind sweeping across the island for several days together with a dreary, monotonous moan which never ceased, I generally sat by their fire, for I had nobody but Tardif to talk to; and now and then there arose an urgent need within me to listen to some friendly voice, and to hear my own speaking in reply. There were only two books in the house, the Bible and the "Pilgrim's Progress," both of them in French; and I had not learned French beyond the few phrases necessary for travelling. But Tardif began to teach me that, and also to mend fishing-nets, which I persevered in, though the twine cut my fingers. Could I by any means make myself useful to them?

As the spring came on, half my dullness vanished. Sark was more beautiful in its cliff scenery than any thing I had ever seen, or could have imagined. Why cannot I describe it to you? I have but to close my eyes, and my memory paints it for me in my brain, with its innumerable islets engirdling it, as if to ward off its busy, indefatigable enemy, the sea. The long, sunken reefs, lying below the water at high tide, but at the ebb stretching like fortifications about it, as if to make of it a sure stronghold in the sea. The strange architecture and carving of the rocks, with faces and crowned heads but half obliterated upon them; the lofty arches, with columns of fretwork bearing them; the pinnacles, and sharp spires; the fallen masses heaped against the base of the cliffs, covered with seaweed, and worn out of all form, yet looking like the fragments of some great temple, with its treasures of sculpture; and about them all the clear, lucid water swelling and tossing, throwing over them sparkling sheets of foam. And the brilliant tone of the golden and saffron lichens, and the delicate tint of the gray and silvery ones, stealing about the bosses and angles and curves of the rocks, as if the rain and the wind and the frost had spent their whole power there to produce artistic effects. I say my memory paints it again for me; but it is only a memory, a shadow that my mind sees; and how can I describe to you a shadow? When words are but phantoms themselves, how can I use them to set forth a phantom?

Whenever the grandeur of the cliffs had wearied me, as one grows weary sometimes of too long and too close a study of what is great, there was a little, enclosed, quiet graveyard that lay in the very lap of the island, where I could go for rest. It was a small patch of ground, a God's acre, shut in on every side by high hedge-rows, which hid every view from sight except that of the heavens brooding over it. Nothing was to be seen but the long mossy mounds above the dead, and the great, warm, sunny dome rising above them. Even the church was not there, for it was built in another spot, and had a few graves of its own scattered about it.

I was sitting there one evening in the early spring, after the sun had dipped below the line of the high hedge-row, though it was still shining in level rays through it. No sound had disturbed the deep silence for a long time, except the twittering of birds among the branches; for up here even the sea could not be heard when it was calm. I suppose my face was sad, as most human faces are apt to be when the spirit is busy in its citadel, and has left the outworks of the eyes and mouth to themselves. So I was sitting quiet, with my hands clasped about my knees, and my face bent down, when a grave, low voice at my side startled me back to consciousness. Tardif was standing beside me, and looking down upon me with a world of watchful anxiety in his deep eyes.

"You are sad, mam'zelle," he said; "too sad for one so young as you are."

"Oh! everybody is sad, Tardif," I answered; "there is a great deal of trouble for every one in this world. You are often very sad indeed."

"Ah! but I have a cause," he said. "Mam'zelle does not know that she is sitting on the grave of my little wife."

He knelt down beside it as he spoke, and laid his hand gently on the green turf. I would have risen, but he would not let me.

"No," he said, "sit still, mam'zelle. Yes, you would have loved her, poor little soul! She was an Englishwoman, like you, only not a lady; a pretty little English girl, so little I could carry her like a baby. None of my people took to her, and she was very lonely, like you again; and she pined and faded away, just quietly, never saying one word against them. No, no, mam'zelle, I like to see you here. This is a favorite place with you, and it gives me pleasure. I ask myself a hundred times a day, 'Is there any thing I can do to make my young lady happy? Tell me what I can do more than I have done."

"There is nothing, Tardif," I answered, "nothing whatever. If you see me sad sometimes, take no notice of it, for you can do no more for me than you are doing. As it is, you are almost the only friend, perhaps the only true friend, I have in the world."

"May God be true to me only as I am true to you!" he said, solemnly, while his dark skin flushed and his eyes kindled. I looked at him closely. A more honest face one could never see, and his keen blue eyes met my gaze steadfastly. Heavy-hearted as I was just then, I could not help but smile, and all his face brightened, as the sea at its dullest brightens suddenly tinder a stray gleam of sunshine. Without another word we both rose to our feet, and stood side by side for a minute, looking down on the little grave beneath us. I would have gladly changed places then with the lonely English girl, who had pined away in this remote island.

After that short, silent pause, we went slowly homeward along the quiet, almost solitary lanes. Twice we met a fisherman, with his creel and nets across his shoulders, who bade us good-night; but no one else crossed our path.

It was a profound monotony, a seclusion I should not have had courage to face wittingly. But I had been led into it, and I dared not quit it. How long was it to last?

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.

A FALSE STEP.

A day came after the winter storms, early, in March, with all the strength and sweetness of spring in it; though there was sharpness enough in the air to make my veins tingle. The sun was shining with so much heat in it, that I might be out-of-doors all day under the shelter of the rocks, in the warm, southern nooks where the daisies were growing. The birds sang more blithely than they had ever done before; a lark overhead, flinging down his triumphant notes; a thrush whistling clearly in a hawthorn-bush hanging over the cliff; and the cry of the gulls flitting about the rocks; I could hear them all at the same moment, with the deep, quiet tone of the sea sounding below their gay music. Tardif was going out to fish, and I had helped him to pack his basket. From my niche in the rocks I could see him getting out of the harbor, and he had caught a glimpse of me, and stood up in his boat, bareheaded, bidding me good-by. I began to sing before he was quite out of hearing, for he paused upon his oars listening, and had given me a joyous shout, and waved his hat round his head, when he was sure it was I who was singing. Nothing could be plainer than that he had gone away more glad at heart than he had been all the winter, simply because he believed that I was growing lighter-hearted. I could not help laughing, yet being touched and softened at the thought of his pleasure. What a good fellow he was! I had proved him by this time, and knew him to be one of the truest, bravest, most unselfish men on God's earth. How good a thing it was that I had met with him that wild night last October, when I had fled like one fleeing from a bitter slavery! For a few minutes my thoughts hovered about that old, miserable, evil time; but I did not care to ponder over past troubles. It was easy to forget them to-day, and I would forget them. I plucked the daisies, and listened almost drowsily to the birds and the sea, and felt all through me the delicious light and heat of the sun. Now and then I lifted up my eyes, to watch Tardif tacking about on the water. There were several boats out, but I kept his in sight, by the help of a queer-shaped patch upon one of the sails. I wished lazily for a book, but I should not have read it if I had had one. I was taking into my heart the loveliness of the spring day.

By twelve o'clock I knew my dinner would be ready, and I had been out in the fresh air long enough to be quite ready for it. Old Mrs. Tardif would be looking out for me impatiently, that she might get the meal over, and the things cleared away, and order restored in her dwelling. So I quitted my warm nook with a feeling of regret, though I knew I could return to it in an hour.

But one can never return to any thing that is once left. When we look for it again, even though the place may remain, something has vanished from it which can never come back. I never returned to my spring-day upon the cliffs of Sark.

A little crumbling path led round the rock and along the edge of the ravine. I chose it because from it I could see all the fantastic shore, bending in a semicircle toward the isle of Breckhou, with tiny, untrodden bays, covered at this hour with only glittering ripples, and with all the soft and tender shadows of the headlands falling across them. I had but to look straight below me, and I could see long tresses of glossy seaweed floating under the surface of the sea. Both my head and my footing were steady, for I had grown accustomed to giddy heights and venturesome climbing. I walked on slowly, casting many a reluctant glance behind me at the calm waters, with the boats gliding to and fro among the islets. I was just giving my last look to them when the loose stones on the crumbling path gave way under my tread, and before I could recover my foothold I found myself slipping down the almost perpendicular face of the cliff, and vainly clutching at every bramble and tuft of grass growing in its clefts.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.

AN ISLAND WITHOUT A DOCTOR.

I had not time to feel any fear, for, almost before I could realize the fact that I was falling, I touched the ground. The point from which I had slipped was above the reach of the water, but I fell upon the shingly beach so heavily that I was hardly conscious for a few minutes. When I came to my senses again, I lay still for a little while, trying to make out where I was, and how I came there. I was stunned and bewildered. Underneath me were the smooth, round pebbles, which lie above the line of the tide on a shore covered with shingles. Above me rose a dark, frowning rock, the chilly shadow of which lay across me. Without lifting my head I could see the water on a level with me, but it did not look on a level; its bright crested waves seemed swelling upward to the sky, ready to pour over me and bury me beneath them. I was very faint, and sick, and giddy. The ground felt as if it were about to sink under me. My eyelids closed languidly when I did not keep them open by an effort; and my head ached, and my brain swam with confused fancies.

After some time, and with some difficulty, I comprehended what had happened to me, and recollected that it was already past mid-day, and Mrs. Tardif would be waiting for me. I attempted to stand up, but an acute pain in my foot compelled me to desist. I tried to turn myself upon the pebbles, and my left arm refused to help me. I could not check a sharp cry of suffering as my left hand fell back upon the stones on which I was lying. My fall had cost me something more than a few minutes' insensibility and an aching head. I had no more power to move than one who is bound hand and foot.

After a few vain efforts I lay quite still again, trying to deliberate as well as I could for the pain which racked me. I reckoned up, after many attempts in which first my memory failed me, and then my faculty of calculation, what the time of the high tide would be, and how soon Tardif would come home. As nearly as I could make out, it would be high water in about two hours. Tardif had set off at low water, as his boat had been anchored at the foot of the rock, where the ladder hung; but before starting he had said something about returning at high tide, and running up his boat on the beach of our little bay. If he did that, he must pass close by me. It was Saturday morning, and he was not in the habit of staying out late on Saturdays, that he might prepare for the services of the next day. I might count, then, upon the prospect of him running the boat into the bay, and finding me there in about two hours' time.

It took me a very long time to make out all this, for every now and then my brain seemed to lose its power for a while, and every thing whirled about me. Especially there was that awful sensation of sinking down, down through the pebbles into some chasm that was bottomless. I had never either felt pain or fainted before, and all this alarmed me.

Presently I began to listen to the rustle of the pebbles, as the rising tide flowed over them and fell back again, leaving them all ajar and grating against one another—strange, gurgling, jangling sound that seemed to have some meaning. It was very cold, and a creeping moisture was oozing up from the water. A vague wonder took hold of me as to whether I was really above the line of the tide, for, now the March tides were come, I did not know how high their flood was. But I thought of it without any active feeling of terror or pain. I was numbed in body and mind. The ceaseless chime of the waves, and the regularity of the rustling play of the pebbles, seemed to lull and soothe me, almost in spite of myself. Cold I was, and in sharp pain, but my mind had not energy enough either for fear or effort. What appeared to me most terrible was the sensation, coming back time after time, of sinking, sinking into the fancied chasm beneath me.

I remember also watching a spray of ivy, far above my head, swaying and waving about in the wind; and a little bird, darting here and there with a brisk flutter of its tiny wings, and a chirping note of satisfaction; and the cloud drifting in soft, small cloudlets across the sky. These things I saw, not as if they were real, but rather as if they were memories of things that had passed before my eyes many years before.

At last—- whether years or hours only had gone by, I could not then have told you—I heard the regular and careful beat of oars upon the water, and presently the grating of a boat's keel upon the shingle, with the rattle of a chain cast out with the grapnel. I could not turn round or raise my head, but I was sure it was Tardif, and that he did not yet see me, for he was whistling softly to himself. I had never heard him whistle before.

"Tardif!" I cried, attempting to shout, but my voice sounded very weak in my own ears, and the other sounds about me seemed very loud. He went on with his unlading, half whistling and half humming his tune, as he landed the nets and creel on the beach.

"Tardif!" I called again, summoning all my strength, and raising my head an inch or two from the hard pebbles which had been its resting-place.

He paused then, and stood quite still, listening. I knew it, though I could not see him. I ran the fingers of my right hand through the loose pebbles about me, and his ear caught the slight noise. In a moment I heard his strong feet coming across them toward me.

"Mon Dieu! mam'zelle," he exclaimed, "what has happened to you?"

I tried to smile as his honest, brown face bent over me, full of alarm. It was so great a relief to see a face like his after that long, weary agony, for it had been agony to me, who did not know what bodily pain was like. But in trying to smile I felt my lips drawn, and my eyes blinded with tears.

"I've fallen down the cliff," I said, feebly, "and I am hurt."

"Mon Dieu!" he cried again. The strong man shook, and his hand trembled as he stooped down and laid it under my head to lift it up a little. His agitation touched me to the heart, even then, and I did my best to speak more calmly.

"Tardif," I whispered, "it is not very much, and I might have been killed. I think my foot is hurt, and I am quite sure my arm is broken."

Speaking made me feel giddy and faint again, so I said no more. He lifted me in his arms as easily and tenderly as a mother lifts up her child, and carried me gently, taking slow and measured strides up the steep slope which led homeward. I closed my eyes, glad to leave myself wholly in his charge, and to have nothing further to dread; yet moaning a little, involuntarily, whenever a fresh pang of pain shot through me. Then he would cry again, "Mon Dieu!" in a beseeching tone, and pause for an instant as if to give me rest. It seemed a long time before we reached the farm-yard gate, and he shouted, with a tremendous voice, to his mother to come and open it. Fortunately she was in sight, and came toward us quickly.

He carried me into the house, and laid me down on the lit de fouaille—a wooden frame forming a sort of couch, and filled with dried fern, which forms the principal piece of furniture in every farm-house kitchen in the Channel Islands. Then he cut away the boot from my swollen ankle, with a steady but careful touch, speaking now and then a word of encouragement, as if I were a child whom he was tending. His mother stood by, looking on helplessly and in bewilderment, for he had not had time to explain my accident to her.

But for my arm, which hung helplessly at my side, and gave me excruciating pain when he touched it, it was quite evident he could do nothing.

"Is there nobody who could set it?" I asked, striving very hard to keep calm.

"We have no doctor in Sark now," he answered. "There is no one but Mother Renouf. I will fetch her."

But when she came she declared herself unable to set a broken limb. They all three held a consultation over it in their own dialect; but I saw by the solemn shaking of their heads, and Tardif's troubled expression, that it was entirely beyond her skill to set it right. She would undertake my sprained ankle, for she was famous for the cure of sprains and bruises, but my arm was past her? The pain I was enduring bathed my face with perspiration, but very little could be done to alleviate it. Tardif's expression grew more and more distressed.

"Mam'zelle knows," he said, stooping down to speak the more softly to me, "there is no doctor nearer than Guernsey, and the night is not far off. What are we to do?"

"Never mind, Tardif," I answered, resolving to be brave; "let the women help me into bed, and perhaps I shall be able to sleep. We must wait till morning."

It was more easily said than done. The two old women did their best, but their touch was clumsy and their help slight, compared to Tardif's. I was thoroughly worn out before I was in bed. But it was a great deal to find myself there, safe and warm, instead of on the cold, hard pebbles on the beach. Mother Renouf put my arm to rest upon a pillow, and bathed and fomented my ankle till it felt much easier.

Never, never shall I forget that night. I could not sleep; but I suppose my mind wandered a little. Hundreds of times I felt myself down on the shore, lying helplessly, while great green waves curled themselves over, and fell just within reach of me, ready to swallow me up, yet always missing me. Then I was back again in my own home in Adelaide, on my father's sheep-farm, and he was still alive, and with no thought but how to make every thing bright and gladsome for me; and hundreds of times I saw the woman who was afterward to be my step-mother, stealing up to the door and trying to get in to him and me. Sometimes I caught myself sobbing aloud, and then Tardif's voice, whispering at the door to ask how mam'zelle was, brought me back to consciousness. Now and then I looked round, fancying I heard my mother's voice speaking to me, and I saw only the wrinkled, yellow face of his mother, nodding drowsily in her seat by the fire. Twice Tardif brought me a cup of tea, freshly made. I could not distinctly made out who he was, or where I was, but I tried to speak loudly enough for him to hear me thank him.

I was very thankful when the first gleam of daylight shone into my room. It seemed to bring clearness to my brain.

"Mam'zelle," said Tardif, coming to my side very early in his fisherman's dress, "I am going to fetch a doctor."

"But it is Sunday," I answered faintly. I knew that no boatman put out to sea willingly on a Sunday from Sark; and the last fatal accident, being on a Sunday, had deepened their reluctance.

"It will be right, mam'zelle," he answered, with glowing eyes. "I have no fear."

"Do not be long away, Tardif," I said, sobbing.

"Not one moment longer than I can help," he replied.

PART THE SECOND.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

DR. MARTIN DOBRÉE.

My name is Martin Dobrée. Martin or Doctor Martin I was called throughout Guernsey. It will be necessary to state a few particulars about my family and position, before I proceed with my part of this narrative.

My father was Dr. Dobrée. He belonged to one of the oldest families in the island—a family of distinguished pur sang; but our branch of it had been growing poorer instead of richer during the last three or four generations. We had been gravitating steadily downward.

My father lived ostensibly by his profession, but actually upon the income of my cousin, Julia Dobrée, who had been his ward from her childhood. The house we dwelt in, a pleasant one in the Grange, belonged to Julia; and fully half of the year's household expenses were defrayed by her. Our practice, which he and I shared between us, was not a large one, though for its extent it was lucrative enough. But there always is an immense number of medical men in Guernsey in proportion to its population, and the island is healthy. There was small chance for any of us to make a fortune.

Then how was it that I, a young man, still under thirty, was wasting my time, and skill, and professional training, by remaining there, a sort of half pensioner on my cousin's bounty? The thickest rope that holds a vessel, weighing scores of tons, safely to the pier-head is made up of strands so slight that almost a breath will break them.

First, then—and the strength of two-thirds of the strands lay there—was my mother. I could never remember the time when she had not been delicate and ailing, even when I was a rough school-boy at Elizabeth College. It was that infirmity of the body which occasionally betrays the wounds of a soul. I did not comprehend it while I was a boy; then it was headache only. As I grew older I discovered that it was heartache. The gnawing of a perpetual disappointment, worse than a sudden and violent calamity, had slowly eaten away the very foundation of healthy life. No hand could administer any medicine for this disease except mine, and, as soon as I was sure of that, I felt what my first duty was.

I knew where the blame of this lay, if any blame there were. I had found it out years ago by my mother's silence, her white cheeks, and her feeble tone of health. My father was never openly unkind or careless, but there was always visible in his manner a weariness of her, an utter disregard for her feelings. He continued to like young and pretty women, just as he had liked her because she was young and pretty. He remained at the very point he was at when they began their married life. There was nothing patently criminal in it, God forbid!—nothing to create an open and a grave scandal on our little island. But it told upon my mother; it was the one drop of water falling day by day. "A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike," says the book of Proverbs. My father's small infidelities were much the same to my mother. She was thrown altogether upon me for sympathy, and support, and love.

When I first fathomed this mystery, my heart rose in very undutiful bitterness against Dr. Dobrée; but by-and-by I found that it resulted less from a want of fidelity to her than from a radical infirmity in his temperament. It was almost as impossible for him to avoid or conceal his preference for younger and more attractive women, as for my mother to conquer the fretting vexation this preference caused to her.

Next to my mother, came Julia, my cousin, five years older than I, who had coldly looked down upon me, and snubbed me like a sister, as a boy; watched my progress through Elizabeth College, and through Guy's Hospital; and perceived at last that I was a young man whom it was no disgrace to call cousin. To crown all, she fell in love with me; so at least my mother told me, taking me into her confidence, and speaking with a depth of pleading in her sunken eyes, which were worn with much weeping. Poor mother! I knew very well what unspoken wish was in her heart. Julia had grown up under her care as I had done, and she stood second to me in her affection.

It is not difficult to love any woman who has a moderate share of attractions—at least I did not find it so then. I was really fond of Julia, too—very fond. I knew her as intimately as any brother knows his sister. She had kept up a correspondence with me all the time I was at Guy's, and her letters had been more interesting and amusing than her conversation generally was. Some women, most cultivated women, can write charming letters; and Julia was a highly-cultivated woman. I came back from Guy's with a very greatly-increased regard and admiration for my cousin Julia.

So, when my mother, with her pleading, wistful eyes, spoke day after day of Julia, of her dutiful love toward her, and her growing love for me, I drifted, almost without an effort of my own volition, into an engagement with her. You see there was no counter-balance. I was acquainted with every girl on the island of my own class; pretty girls were many of them, but there was after all not one that I preferred to my cousin. My old dreams and romances about love, common to every young fellow, had all faded into a very commonplace, everyday vision of having a comfortable house of my own, and a wife as good as most other men's wives. Just in the same way, my ambitious plans of rising to the very top of the tree in my profession had dwindled down to satisfaction with the very limited practice of one of our island doctors. I found myself chained to this rock in the sea; all my future life would probably be spent there; and Fate offered me Julia as the companion fittest for me. I was contented with my fate, and laughed off my boyish fancy that I ought to be ready to barter the world for love.

Added to these two strong ties keeping me in Guernsey, there were the hundred, the thousand small associations which made that island, and my people living upon it, dearer than any other place, or any other people, in the world. Taking the strength of the rope which held me to the pier-head as represented by one hundred, then my love for my mother would stand at sixty-six and a half, my engagement to Julia at about twenty and the remainder may go toward my old associations. That is pretty nearly the sum of it.

My engagement to Julia came about so easily and naturally that, as I said, I was perfectly contented with it. We had been engaged since the previous Christmas, and were to be married in the early summer, as soon as a trip through Switzerland would be agreeable. We were to set up housekeeping for ourselves; that was a point Julia was bent upon. A suitable house had fallen vacant in one of the higher streets of St. Peter-Port, which commanded a noble view of the sea and the surrounding islands. We had taken it, though it was farther from the Grange and my mother than I should have chosen my home to be. She and Julia were busy, pleasantly busy, about the furnishing of it. Never had I seen my mother look so happy, or so young. Even my father paid her a compliment or two, which had the effect of bringing a pretty pink flush to her white cheeks, and of making her sunken eyes shine. As to myself, I was quietly happy, without a doubt. Julia was a good girl, everybody said that, and Julia loved me devotedly. I was on the point of becoming master of a house and owner of a considerable income; for Julia would not hear of there being any marriage settlements which would secure to her the property she was bringing to me. I found that making love, even to my cousin, who was like a sister to me, was upon the whole a pleasurable occupation. Every thing was going on smoothly.

That was till about the middle of March. I had been to church one Sunday morning with these two women, both devoted to me, and centring all their love and hopes in me, when, as we entered the house on our return, I heard my father calling "Martin! Martin!" as loudly as he could from his consulting-room. I answered the call instantly, and whom should I see but a very old friend of mine, Tardif of the Havre Gosselin. He was standing near the door, as if in too great a hurry to sit down. His handsome but weather-beaten face betrayed great anxiety, and his shaggy mustache rose and fell, as if the mouth below it was tremulously at work. My father looked chagrined and irresolute.

"Here's a pretty piece of work, Martin," he said; "Tardif wants one of us to go back with him to Sark, to see a woman who has fallen from the cliffs and broken her arm, confound it!"

"For the sake of the good God, Dr. Martin," cried Tardif, excitedly, and of course speaking in the Sark dialect, "I beg of you to come this instant even. She has been lying in anguish since mid-day yesterday—twenty-four hours now, sir. I started at dawn this morning, but both wind and tide were against me, and I have been waiting here some time. Be quick, doctor. Mon Dieu! if she should be dead!"

The poor fellow's voice faltered, and his eyes met mine imploringly. He and I had been fast friends in my boyhood, when all my holidays were spent in Sark, though he was some years older than I; and our friendship was still firm and true, though it had slackened a little from absence. I shook his hand heartily, giving it a good hard grip in token of my unaltered friendship—a grip which he returned with his fingers of iron till my own tingled again.

"I knew you'd come," he gasped.

"Ah, I'll go, Tardif," I said; "only I must get a snatch of something to eat while Dr. Dobrée puts up what I shall have need of. I'll be ready in half an hour. Go into the kitchen, and get some dinner yourself."

"Thank you, Dr. Martin," he answered, his voice still unsteady, and his mustache quivering; "but I can eat nothing. I'll go down and have the boat ready. You'll waste no time?"

"Not a moment," I promised.

I left my father to put up the things I should require, supposing he had heard all the particulars of the accident from Tardif. He was inclined to grumble a little at me for going; but I asked him what else I could have done. As he had no answer ready to that question, I walked away to the dining-room, where my mother and Julia were waiting; for dinner was ready, as we dined early on Sundays on account of the servants. Julia was suffering from the beginning of a bilious attack, to which she was subject, and her eyes were heavy and dull. I told them hastily where I was going, and what a hurry I was in.

"You are never going across to Sark to-day!" Julia exclaimed.

"Why not?" I asked, taking my seat and helping myself quickly.

"Because I am sure bad weather is coming," she answered, looking anxiously through a window facing the west. "I could see the coast of France this morning as plainly as Sark, and the gulls are keeping close to the shore, and the sunset last night was threatening. I will go and look at the storm-glass."

She went away, but came back again very soon, with an increase of anxiety in her face. "Don't go, dear Martin," she said, with her hand upon my shoulder; "the storm-glass is as troubled as it can be, and the wind is veering round to the west. You know what that foretells at this time of the year. There is a storm at hand; take my word for it, and do not venture across to Sark to-day."

"And what is to become of the poor woman?" I remonstrated. "Tardif says she has been suffering the pain of a broken limb these twenty-four hours. It would be my duty to go even if the storm were here, unless the risk was exceedingly great. Come, Julia, remember you are to be a doctor's wife, and don't be a coward."

"Don't go!" she reiterated, "for my sake and your mother's. I am certain some trouble will come of it. We shall be frightened to death; and this woman is only a stranger to you. Oh, I cannot bear to let you go!"

I did not attempt to reason with her, for I knew of old that when Julia was bilious and nervous she was quite deaf to reason. I only stroked the hand that lay on my shoulder, and went on with my dinner as if my life depended upon the speed with which I dispatched it.

"Uncle," she said, as my father came in with a small portmanteau in his hand, "tell Martin he must not go. There is sure to be a storm to-night."

"Pooh! pooh!" he answered. "I should be glad enough for Martin to stay at home, but there's no help for it, I suppose. There will be no storm at present, and they'll run across quickly. It will be the coming back that will be difficult. You'll scarcely get home again to-night, Martin."

"No," I said. "I'll stop at Gavey's, and come back in the Sark cutter if it has begun to ply. If not, Tardif must bring me over in the morning."

"Don't go," persisted Julia, as I thrust myself into my rough pilot-coat, and then bent down to kiss her cheek. Julia always presented me her cheek, and my lips had never met hers yet. My mother was standing by and looking tearful, but she did not say a word; she knew there was no question about what I ought to do. Julia followed me to the door and held me fast with both hands round my arm, sobbing out hysterically, "Don't go!" Even when I had released myself and was running down the drive, I could hear her still calling, "O Martin, don't go!"

I was glad to get out of hearing. I felt sorry for her, yet there was a considerable amount of pleasure in being the object of so much tender solicitude. I thought of her for a minute or two as I hurried along the steep streets leading down to the quay. But the prospect before me caught my eye. Opposite lay Sark, bathed in sunlight, and the sea between was calm enough at present. A ride across, with a westerly breeze filling the sails, and the boat dancing lightly over the waves, would not be a bad exchange for a dull Sunday afternoon, with Julia at the Sunday-school and my mother asleep. Besides, it was the path of duty which was leading me across the quiet gray sea before me.

Tardif was waiting, with his sails set and oars in the rowlocks, ready for clearing the harbor. I took one of them, and bent myself willingly to the light task. There was less wind than I had expected, but what there was blew in our favor. We were very quickly beyond the pier-head, where a group of idlers was always gathered, who sent after us a few warning shouts. Nothing could be more exhilarating than our onward progress. I felt as if I had been a prisoner, with, chains which had pressed heavily yet insensibly upon me, and that now I was free. I drew into my lungs the fresh, bracing, salt air of the sea, with a deep sigh of delight.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

A PATIENT IN SARK.

It struck me after a while that my friend Tardif was unusually silent. The shifting of the sails appeared to give him plenty to do; and to my surprise, instead of keeping to the ordinary course, he ran recklessly as it seemed across the grunes, which lie all about the bed of the channel between Guernsey and Sark. These grunes are reefs, rising a little above low water, but, as the tide was about half-flood, they were a few feet below it; yet at times there was scarcely enough depth to float us over them, while the brown seaweed torn from their edges lay in our wake, something like the swaths of grass in a meadow after the scythe has swept through it. Now and then came a bump and a scrape of the keel against their sharp ridges. The sweat stood in beads upon Tardif's face, and his thick hair fell forward over his forehead, where the great veins in the temples were purple and swollen. I spoke to him after a heavier bump over the grunes than any we had yet come to.

"Tardif," I said, "we are shaving the weeds a little too close, aren't we?"

"Look behind you, Dr. Martin," he answered, shifting the sails a little.

I did not look behind us. We were more than half-way over the channel, and Guernsey lay four miles or so west of us; but instead of the clear outline of the island standing out against the sky, I could see nothing but a bank of white fog. The afternoon sun was shining brightly over it, but before long it would dip into its dense folds. The fogs about our islands are peculiar. You may see them form apparently thick blocks of blanched vapor, with a distinct line between the atmosphere where the haze is and where it is not. To be overtaken by a fog like this, which would almost hide Tardif at one end of the boat from me at the other, would be no laughing matter in a sea lined with sunken reefs. The wind had almost gone, but a little breeze still caught us from the north of the fog-bank. Without a word I took the oars again, while Tardif devoted himself to the sails and the helm.

"A mile nearer home," he said, "and I could row my boat as easily in the dark as you could ride your horse along a lane."

My face was westward now, and I kept my eye upon the fog-bank creeping stealthily after us. I thought of my mother and Julia, and the fright they would be in. Moreover a fog like this was pretty often succeeded by a squall, especially at this season; and when a westerly gale blew up from the Atlantic in the month of March, no one could foretell when it would cease. I had been weather-bound in Sark, when I was a boy, for three weeks at one time, when our provisions ran short, and it was almost impossible to buy a loaf of bread. I could not help laughing at the recollection, but I kept an anxious lookout toward the west. Three weeks' imprisonment in Sark now would be a bore.

But the fog remained almost stationary in the front of Guernsey, and the round red eyeball of the sun glared after us as we ran nearer and nearer to Sark. The tide was with us, and carried us on it buoyantly. We anchored at the fisherman's landing-place below the cliff of the Havre Gosselin, and I climbed readily up the rough ladder which leads to the path. Tardif made his boat secure, and followed me; he passed me, and strode on up the steep track to the summit of the cliff, as if impatient to reach his home. It was then that I gave my first serious thought to the woman who had met with the accident.

"Tardif, who is this person that is hurt?" I asked, "and whereabout did she fall?"

"She fell down yonder," he answered, with an odd quaver in his voice, as he pointed to a rough and rather high portion of the cliff running inland; "the stones rolled from under her feet, so," he added, crushing down a quantity of the loose gravel with his foot, "and she slipped. She lay on the shingle underneath for two hours before I found her; two hours, Dr. Martin!"

"That was bad," I said, for the good fellow's voice failed him—"very bad. A fall like that might have killed her."

We went on, he carrying his oars, and I my little portmanteau. I heard Tardif muttering. "Killed her!" in a tone of terror; but his face brightened a little when we reached the gate of the farm-yard. He laid down the oars noiselessly upon the narrow stone causeway before the door, and lifted the latch as cautiously as if he were afraid to disturb some sleeping baby.

He had given me no information with regard to my patient; and the sole idea I had formed of her was of a strong, sturdy Sark woman, whose constitution would be tough, and her temperament of a stolid, phlegmatic tone. There was not ordinarily much sickness among them, and this case was evidently one of pure accident. I expected to find a nut-brown, sunburnt woman, with a rustic face, who would very probably be impatient and unreasonable under the pain I should be compelled to inflict upon her.

It had been my theory that a medical man, being admitted to the highest degree of intimacy with his patients, was bound to be as insensible as an anchorite to any beauty or homeliness in those whom he was attending professionally; he should have eyes only for the malady he came to consider and relieve. Dr. Dobrée had often sneered and made merry at my high-flown notions of honor and duty; but in our practice at home he had given me no opportunities of trying them. He had attended all our younger and more attractive patients himself, and had handed over to my care all the old people and children—on Julia's account, he had said, laughing.

Tardif's mother came to us as we entered the house. She was a little, ugly woman, stone deaf, as I knew of old. Yet in some mysterious way she could make out her son's deep voice, when he shouted into her ear. He did not speak now, however, but made dumb signs as if to ask how all was going on. She answered by a silent nod, and beckoned me to follow her into an inner room, which opened out of the kitchen.

It was a small, crowded room, with a ceiling so low, it seemed to rest upon the four posts of the bedstead. There were of course none of the little dainty luxuries about it with which I was familiar in my mother's bedroom. A long, low window opposite the head of the bed threw a strong light upon it. There were check curtains drawn round it, and a patchwork-quilt, and rough, homespun linen. Every thing was clean, but coarse and frugal—such as I expected to find about my Sark patient, in the home of a fisherman.

But when my eye fell upon the face resting on the rough pillow I paused involuntarily, only just controlling an explanation of surprise. There was absolutely nothing in the surroundings to mark her as a lady, yet I felt in a moment that she was one. There lay a delicate, refined face, white as the linen, with beautiful lips almost as white; and a mass of light, shining, silky hair tossed about the pillow; and large dark-gray eyes gazing at me beseechingly, with an expression that made my heart leap as it had never leaped before.

That was what I saw, and could not forbear seeing. I tried to recall my theory, and to close my eyes to the pathetic beauty of the face before me; but it was altogether in vain. If I had seen her before, or if I had been prepared to see any one like her, I might have succeeded; but I was completely thrown off my guard. There the charming face lay: the eyes gleaming, the white forehead tinted, and the delicate mouth contracting with pain: the bright, silky curls tossed about in confusion. I see it now just as I saw it then.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

WITHOUT RESOURCES.

I suppose I did not stand still more than five seconds, yet during that pause a host of questions had flashed through my brain. Who was this beautiful creature? Where had she come from? How did it happen that she was in Tardif's house? and so on. But I recalled myself sharply to my senses; I was here as her physician, and common-sense and duty demanded of me to keep my head clear. I advanced to her side, and took the small, blue-veined hand in mine, and felt her pulse with my fingers. It beat under them a low but fast measure; too fast by a great deal. I could see that the general condition of her health was perfect, a great charm in itself to me; but she had been bearing acute pain for over twenty-eight hours, and she was becoming exhausted. A shudder ran through me at the thought of that long spell of suffering.

"You are in very great pain, I fear," I said, lowering my voice.

"Yes," her white lips answered, and she tried to smile a patient though a dreary smile, as she looked up into my face, "my arm is broken. Are you a doctor?"

"I am Dr. Martin Dobrée," I said, passing my hand softly down her arm. The fracture was above the elbow, and was of a kind to make the setting of it give her considerable pain. I could see she was scarce fit to bear any further suffering just then; but what was to be done? She was not likely to get much rest till the bone was set.

"Have you had much sleep since your fall?" I asked, looking at the weariness visible in her eyes.

"Not any," she replied; "not one moment's sleep."

"Did you have no sleep all night?" I inquired again.

"No." she said, "I could not fall asleep."

There were two things I could do—give her an opiate, and strengthen her a little with sleep beforehand, or administer chloroform to her before the operation. I hesitated between the two. A natural sleep would have done her a world of good, but there was a gleam in her eyes, and a feverish throb in her pulse, which gave me no hope of that. Perhaps the chloroform, if she had no objection to it, would be the best.

"Did you ever take chloroform?" I asked.

"No: I never needed it," she answered.

"Should you object to taking it?"

"Any thing." she replied, passively. "I will do any thing you wish."

I went back into the kitchen and opened the portmanteau my father had put up for me. Splints and bandages were there in abundance, enough to set half the arms in the island, but neither chloroform nor any thing in the shape of an opiate could I find. I might almost as well have come to Sark altogether unprepared for my case.

What could I do? There are no shops in Sark, and drugs of any kind were out of the question. There was not a chance of getting what I needed to calm and soothe a highly-nervous and finely-strung temperament like my patient's. A few minutes ago I had hesitated about using chloroform. Now I would have given half of every thing I possessed in the world for an ounce of it.

I said nothing to Tardif, who was watching me with his deep-set eyes, as closely as if I were meddling with some precious possession of his own. I laid the bundle of splints and rolls of linen down on the table with a professional air, while I was inwardly execrating my father's negligence. I emptied the portmanteau in the hope of finding some small phial or box. Any opiate would have been welcome to me, that would have dulled the overwrought nerves of the girl in the room within. But the practice of using any thing of the kind was not in favor with us generally in the Channel Islands, and my father had probably concluded that a Sark woman would not consent to use them. At any rate, there they were not.

I stood for a few minutes, deep in thought. The daylight was going, and it was useless to waste time; yet I found myself shrinking oddly from the duty before me. Tardif could not help but see my chagrin and hesitation.

"Doctor," he cried, "she is not going to die?"

"No, no," I answered, calling back my wandering thoughts and energies; "there is not the smallest danger of that. I must go and set her arm at once, and then she will sleep."

I returned to the room, and raised her as gently and painlessly as I could, motioning to the old woman to sit beside her on the bed and hold her steadily. I thought once of calling in Tardif to support her with his strong frame, but I did not. She moaned, though very softly, when I moved her, and she tried to smile again as her eyes met mine looking anxiously at her. That smile made me feel like a child. If she did it again, I knew my hands would be unsteady, and her pain would be tenfold greater.

"I would rather you cried out or shouted," I said. "Don't try to control yourself when I hurt you. You need not be afraid of seeming impatient, and a loud scream or two would do you good."

But I knew quite well as I spoke that she would never scream aloud. There was the self-control of culture about her. A woman of the lower class might shriek and cry, but this girl would try to smile at the moment when the pain was keenest. The white, round arm under my hands was cold, and the muscles were soft and unstrung. I felt the ends of the broken bone grating together as I drew the fragments into their right places, and the sensation went through and through me. I had set scores of broken limbs before with no feeling like this, which was so near unnerving me. But I kept my hands steady, and my attention fixed upon my work. I felt like two persons—a surgeon who had a simple, scientific operation to perform, and a mother who feels in her own person every pang her child has to suffer.

All the time the girl's white face and firmly-set lips lay under my gaze, with the wide-open, unflinching eyes looking straight at me: a mournful, silent, appealing face, which betrayed the pain I made her suffer ten times more than any cries or shrieks could have done. I thanked God in my heart when it was over, and I could lay her down again. I smoothed the coarse pillows for her to lie more comfortably upon them, and I spread my cambric handkerchief in a double fold between her cheek and the rough linen—too rough for a soft cheek like hers.

"Lie quite still," I said. "Do not stir, but go to sleep as fast as you can."

She was not smiling now, and she did not speak; but the gleam in her eyes was growing wilder, and she looked at me with a wandering expression. If sleep did not come very soon, there would be mischief. I drew the curtains across the window to shut out the twilight, and motioned to the old woman to sit quietly by the side of our patient.

Then I went out to Tardif.

He had not stirred from the place and position in which I had left him. I am sure no sound could have reached him from the inner room, for we had been so still that during the whole time I could hear the beat of the sea dashing up between the high cliffs of the Havre Gosselin. Up and down went Tardif's shaggy mustache, the surest indication of emotion with him, and he fetched his breath almost with a sob.

"Well, Dr. Martin?" was all he said.

"The arm is set," I answered, "and now she must get some sleep. There is not the least danger, Tardif; only we will keep the house as quiet as possible."

"I must go and bring in the boat," he replied, bestirring himself as if some spell was at an end. "There will be a storm to-night, and I should sleep the sounder if she was safe ashore."

"I'll come with you," I said, glad to get away from the seaweed fire.

It was not quite dark, and the cliffs stood out against the sky in odder and more grotesque shapes than by daylight. A host of seamews were fluttering about and uttering the most unearthly hootings, but the sea was as yet quite calm, save where it broke in wavering, serpentine lines over the submerged reefs which encircle the island. The tidal current was pouring rapidly through the very narrow channel between Sark and the little isle of Breckhou, and its eddies stretching to us made it rather an arduous task to get Tardif's boat on shore safely. But the work was pleasant just then. It kept our minds away from useless anxieties about the girl. An hour passed quickly, and up the ravine, in the deep gloom of the overhanging rocks, we made our way homeward.

"You will not quit the island to-morrow," said Tardif, standing at his door, and scanning the sky with his keen, weather-wise eyes.

"I must," I answered; "I must indeed, old fellow. You are no land-lubber, and you will run me over in the morning."

"No boat will leave Sark to-morrow," said Tardif, shaking his head.

We went in, and he threw off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, preparatory to frying some fish for supper. I was beginning to feel ravenously hungry, for I had eaten nothing since dinner, and as far as I knew Tardif had had nothing since his early breakfast, but as a fisherman he was used to long spells of fasting. While he was busy cooking I stole quietly into the inner room to look after my patient.

The feeble light entering by the door, which I left open, showed me the old woman comfortably asleep in her chair, but not so the girl. I had told her when I laid her down that she must lie quite still, and she was obeying me implicitly. Her cheek still rested upon my handkerchief, and the broken arm remained undisturbed upon the pillow which I had placed under it. But her eyes were wide open and shining in the dimness, and I fancied I could see her lips moving incessantly, though soundlessly. I laid my hand across her eyes, and felt the long lashes brush against the palm, but the eyelids did not remain closed.

"You must go to sleep," I said, speaking distinctly and authoritatively; wondering at the time how much power my will would have over her. Did I possess any of that magnetic, tranquillizing influence about which Jack Senior and I had so often laughed incredulously at Guy's? Her lips moved fast; for now my eyes had grown used to the dim light I could see her face plainly, but I could not catch a syllable of what she was whispering so busily to herself.

Never had I felt so helpless and disconcerted in the presence of a patient. I could positively do nothing for her. The case was not beyond my skill, but all medicinal resources were beyond my reach. Sleep she must have, yet how was I to administer it to her?

I returned, troubled and irritable, to search once more my empty portmanteau. Empty it was, except of the current number of Punch, which my father had considerately packed among the splints for my Sunday-evening reading. I flung it and the bag across the kitchen, with an ejaculation not at all flattering to Dr. Dobrée, nor in accordance with the fifth commandment.

"What is the matter, doctor?" inquired Tardif.

I told him in a few sharp words what I wanted to soothe my patient. In an instant he left his cooking and thrust his arms into his blue jacket again.

"You can finish it yourself, Dr. Martin," he said, hurriedly; "I'll run over to old Mother Renouf; she'll have some herbs or something to send mam'zelle to sleep."

"Bring her back with you," I shouted after him as he sped across the yard. Mother Renouf was no stranger to me. While I was a boy she had charmed my warts away, and healed the bruises which were the inevitable consequences of cliff-climbing. I scarcely liked her coming in to fill up my deficiencies, and I knew our application to her for help would be inexpressibly gratifying. But I had no other resource than to call her in as a fellow-practitioner, and I knew she would make a first-rate nurse, for which Suzanne Tardif was unfitted by her deafness.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

A RIVAL PRACTITIONER.

Mother Renouf arrived from the other end of the island in an incredibly short time, borne along by Tardif as if he were a whirlwind and she a leaf caught in its current. She was a short, squat old woman, with a skin tanned like leather, and kindly little blue eyes, twinkling with delight and pride. Yes, there they are, photographed somewhere in my brain, the wrinkled, yellow, withered faces of the two old women, their watery eyes and toothless mouths, with figures as shapeless as the bowlders on the beach, watching beside the bed where lay the white but tenderly beautiful face of the young girl, with her curls of glossy hair tossed about the pillow, and her long, tremulous eyelashes making a shadow on her rounded cheek.

Mother Renouf gave me a hearty tap on the shoulder, and chuckled as merrily as the shortness of her breath after her rapid course would permit. The few English phrases she knew fell far short of expressing her triumph and exultation; but I was resolved to confer with her affably. My patient's case was too serious for me to stand upon my dignity.

"Mother," I said, "have you any simples to send this poor girl to sleep? Tardif told me you had taken her sprained ankle under your charge. I find I have nothing with me to induce sleep, and you can help us if any one can."

"Leave her to me, my dear little doctor," she answered, a laugh gurgling in her thick throat; "leave her to me. You have done your part with the bones. I have no touch at all for broken limbs, though my father, good man, could handle them with any doctor in all the islands. But I'll send her to sleep for you, never fear."

"You will stay with us all night?" I said, coaxingly. "Suzanne is deaf, and ears are of use in a sick-room, you know. I intended to go to Gavey's, but I shall throw myself down here on the fern bed, and you can call me at any moment, if there is need."

"There will be no need," she replied, in a tone of confidence. "My little mam'zelle will be sound asleep in ten minutes after she has taken my draught."

I went into the room with her to have a look at our patient. She had not stirred yet, but was precisely in the position in which I placed her after the operation was ended. There was something peculiar about this which distressed me. I asked Mother Renouf to move her gently and bring her face more toward me. The burning eyes opened widely as soon as she felt the old woman's arm under her, and she looked up, with a flash of intelligence, into my face. I stooped down to catch the whisper with which her lips were moving.

"You told me not to stir," she murmured.

"Yes," I said; "but you are not to lie still till you are cramped and stiff. Are you in much pain now?"

"He told me not to stir," muttered the parched lips again, "not to stir. I must lie quite still, quite still, quite still!"

The feeble voice died away as she whispered the last words, but her lips went on moving, as if she was repeating them to herself still. Certainly there was mischief here. My last order, given just before her mind began to wander, had taken possession of her brain, and retained authority over her will. There was a pathetic obedience in her perfect immobility, united with the shifting, restless glance of her eyes, and the ceaseless ripple of movement about her mouth, which made me trebly anxious and uneasy. A dominant idea had taken hold upon her which might prove dangerous. I was glad when Mother Renouf had finished stewing her decoction of poppy-heads, and brought the nauseous draught for the girl to drink.

But whether the poppy-heads had lost their virtue, or our patient's nervous condition had become too critical, too full of excitement and disturbance, I cannot tell. It is certain that she was not sleeping in ten minutes' or in an hour's time. Old Dame Tardif went off to her bedroom, and Mother Renouf took her place by the girl's side. Tardif could not be persuaded to leave the kitchen, though he appeared to be falling asleep heavily, waking up at intervals, and starting with terror at the least sound. For myself I scarcely slept at all, though I found the fern bed a tolerably comfortable resting-place.

The gale that Tardif had foretold came with great violence about the middle of the night. The wind howled up the long, narrow ravine like a pack of wolves; mighty storms of hail and rain beat in torrents against the windows, and the sea lifted up its voice with unmistakable energy. Now and again a stronger gust than the others appeared to threaten to carry off the thatched roof bodily, and leave us exposed to the tempest with only the thick stone walls about us; and the latch of the outer door rattled as if some one outside was striving to enter. I am not fanciful, but just then the notion came across me that if that door opened we should see the grim skeleton, Death, on the threshold, with his bleached, unclad bones dripping with the storm. I laughed at the ghastly fancy, and told it to Tardif in one of his waking intervals, but he was so terrified and troubled by it that it grew to have some little importance in my own eyes. So the night wore slowly away, the tall clock in the corner ticking out the seconds and striking the hours with a fidelity to its duty, which helped to keep me awake. Twice or thrice I crept, with quite unnecessary caution, into the room of my patient.

No, there was no symptom of sleep there. The pulse grew more rapid, the temples throbbed, and the fever gained ground. Mother Renouf was ready to weep with vexation. The girl herself sobbed and shuddered at the loud sounds of the tempest without; but yet, by a firm, supreme effort of her will, which was exhausting her strength dangerously, she kept herself quite still. I would have given up a year or two of my life to be able to set her free from the bondage of my own command.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

LOCKS OF HAIR.

The westerly gale, rising every few hours into a squall, gave me no chance of leaving Sark the next day, nor for some days afterward; but I was not at all put out by my captivity. All my interest—my whole being, in fact—was absorbed in the care of this girl, stranger as she was. I thought and moved, lived and breathed, only to fight step by step against delirium and death, and to fight without my accustomed weapons. Sometimes I could do nothing but watch the onset and inroads of the fever most helplessly. There was no possibility of aid. The stormy waters which beat against that little rock in the sea came swelling and rolling in from the vast plain of the Atlantic, and broke in tempestuous surf against the island. The wind howled, and the rain and hail beat across us almost incessantly for two days, and Tardif himself was kept a prisoner in the house, except when he went to look after his live-stock. No doubt it would have been practicable for me to get as far as the hotel, but to what good? It would be quite deserted, for there were no visitors to Sark at this season, and I did not give it a second thought. I was entirely engrossed in my patient, and I learned for the first time what their task is who hour after hour watch the progress of disease in the person, of one dear to them.

Tardif occupied himself with mending his nets, pausing frequently with his solemn eyes fixed upon the door of the girl's room, very much as a patient mastiff watches the spot where he knows his master is near to him, though out of sight. His mother went about her household work ploddingly, and Mother Renouf kept manfully to her post, in turn with me, as sentinel over the sickbed. There the young girl lay whispering from morning till night, and from night till morning again—always whispering. The fever gained ground from hour to hour. I had no data by which to calculate her chances of getting through it; but my hopes were very low at times.

On the Tuesday afternoon, in a temporary lull of the hail and wind, I started off on a walk across the island. The wind was still blowing from the southwest, and filling all the narrow sea between us and Guernsey with boiling surge. Very angry looked the masses of foam whirling about the sunken reefs, and very ominous the low-lying, hard blocks of clouds all along the horizon. I strolled as far as the Coupée, that giddy pathway between Great and Little Sark, where one can see the seething of the waves at the feet of the cliffs on both sides, three hundred feet below one. Something like a panic seized me. My nerves were too far unstrung for me to venture across the long, narrow isthmus. I turned abruptly again, and hurried as fast as my legs would carry me back to Tardif's cottage.

I had been away less than an hour, but an advantage had been taken of my absence. I found Tardif seated at the table, with a tangle of silky, shining hair lying before him. A tear or two had fallen upon it from his eyes. I understood at a glance what it meant. Mother Renouf had cut off my patient's pretty curls as soon as I was out of the house. I could not be angry with her, though I did not suppose it would do much good, and I felt a sort of resentment, such as a mother would feel, at this sacrifice of a natural beauty. They were all disordered and ravelled. Tardif's great hand caressed them tenderly, and I drew out one long, glossy tress and wound it about my fingers, with a heavy heart.

"It is like the pretty feathers of a bird that has been wounded," said Tardif, sorrowfully.

Just then there came a knock at the door and a sharp click of the latch, loud enough to penetrate Dame Tardif's deaf ears, or to arouse our patient, if she had been sleeping. Before either of us could move, the door was thrust open, and two young ladies appeared upon the door-sill.

They were—it flashed across me in an instant—old school-fellows and friends of Julia's. I declare to you honestly, I had scarcely had one thought of Julia till now. My mother I had wished for, to take her place by this poor girl's side, but Julia had hardly crossed my mind. Why, in Heaven's name, should the appearance of these friends of hers be so distasteful to me just now? I had known them all my life, and liked them as well as any girls I knew; but at this moment the very sight of them was annoying. They stood in the doorway, as much astonished and thunderstricken as I was, glaring at me, so it seemed to me, with that soft, bright-brown lock of hair curling and clinging round my finger. Never had I felt so foolish or guilty.

"Martin Dobrée!" ejaculated both in one breath.

"Yes, mesdemoiselles," I said, uncoiling the tress of hair as if it had been a serpent, and going forward to greet them; "are you surprised to see me?"

"Surprised!" echoed the elder. "No; we are amazed—petrified! However did you get here? When did you come?"

"Quite easily," I replied. "I came on Sunday, and Tardif fetched me in his own boat. If the weather had permitted, I should have paid you a call; but you know what it has been."

"To be sure," answered Emma; "and how is dear Julia? She will be very anxious about you."

"She was on the verge of a bilious attack when I left her," I said; "that will tend to increase her anxiety."

"Poor, dear girl," she replied, sympathetically. "But, Martin, is this young woman here so very ill? We have heard from the Renoufs she had had a dangerous fall. To think of your being in Sark ever since Sunday, and we never heard a word of it!"

No, thanks to Tardif's quiet tongue, and Mother Renouf's assiduous attendance upon mam'zelle, my sojourn in the island had been kept a secret; now that was at an end.

"Is that the young woman's hair?" asked Emma, as Tardif gathered together the scattered tresses and tied them up quickly in a little white handkerchief, out of their sight and mine. I saw them again afterward. The handkerchief had been his wife's—white, with a border of pink roses.

"Yes," I replied to her question, "it was necessary to cut it off. She is dangerously ill with fever."

Both of them shrank a little toward the door. A sudden temptation assailed me, and took me so much by surprise that I had yielded before I knew I was attacked. It was their shrinking movement that did it. My answer was almost as automatic and involuntary as their retreat.

"You see it would not be wise for any of us to go about," I said. "A fever breaking out in the island, especially now you have no resident doctor, would be very serious. I think it will be best to isolate this case till we see the nature of the fever. You will do me a favor by warning the people away from us at present. The storm has saved us so far, but now we must take other precautions."

This I said with a grave tone and face, knowing all the while that there was no fear whatever for the people of Sark. Was there a propensity in me, not hitherto developed, to make the worst of a case?

"Good-by, Martin, good-by," cried Emma, backing out through the open door. "Come away, Maria. We have run no risk yet, Martin, have we? Do not come any nearer to us. We have touched nothing, except shaking hands with you. Are we quite safe?"

"Is the young woman so very ill?" inquired Maria from a safe distance outside the house.

I shook my head in silence, and pointed to the door of the inner room, intimating to them that she was no farther away than there. An expression of horror came over both their faces. Scarcely waiting to bestow upon me a gesture of farewell, they fled, and I saw them hurrying with unusual rapidity across the fold.

I had at least secured isolation for myself and my patient. But why had I been eager to do so? I could not answer that question to myself, and I did not ponder over it many minutes. I was impatient, yet strangely reluctant, to look at the sick girl again, after the loss of her beautiful hair. It was still daylight. The change in her appearance struck me as singular. Her face before had a look of suffering and trouble, making it almost old, charming as it was; now she had the aspect of quite a young girl, scarcely touching upon womanhood. Her hair had not been shorn off closely—the woman could not manage that—and short, wavy tresses, like those of a young child, were curling about her exquisitely-shaped head. The white temples, with their blue, throbbing veins, were more visible, with the small, delicately-shaped ears. I should have guessed her age now as barely fifteen—almost that of a child. Thus changed, I felt more myself in her presence, more as I should have been in attendance upon any child. I scanned her face narrowly, and it struck me that there was a perceptible alteration; an expression of exhaustion or repose was creeping over it. The crisis of the fever was at hand. The repose of death or the wholesome sleep of returning health was not far off. Mother Renouf saw it as well as myself.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

WHO IS SHE?

We sat up again together that night, Tardif and I. He would not smoke, lest the scent of the tobacco should get in through the crevices of the door, and lessen the girl's chance of sleep; but he held his pipe between his teeth, taking an imaginary puff now and then, that he might keep himself wide awake. We talked to one another in whispers.

"Tell me all you know about mam'zelle," I said. He had been chary of his knowledge before, but his heart seemed open at this moment. Most hearts are more open at midnight than at any other hour.

"There's not much to tell, doctor," he answered. "Her name is Ollivier, as I said to you; but she does not think she is any kin to the Olliviers of Guernsey. She is poor, though she does not look as if she had been born poor, does she?"

"Not in the least degree," I said. "If she is not a lady of birth, she is one of the first specimens of Nature's gentlefolks I have ever come across."

"Ah, there is a difference!" he said, sighing. "I feel it, doctor, in every word I speak to her, and every step I walk with her eyes upon me. Why cannot I be like her, or like you? You'll be on a level with her, and I am down far below her."

I looked at him curiously. The slouching figure—well shaped as it was—the rough, knotted hands, the unkempt mass of hair about his head and face, marked him for what he was—a toiler on the sea as well as on the land. He understood my scrutiny, and colored under it like a girl.

"You are a better fellow than I am, Tardif," I said; "but that has nothing to do with our talk. I think we ought to communicate with the young lady's friends, whoever they may be, as soon as there are any means of communicating with the rest of the world. We should be in a fix if any thing should happen to her. Have you no clew to her friends?"

"She is not going to die!" he cried. "No, no, doctor. God must hear my prayers for her. I have never ceased to lift up my voice to Him in my heart since I found her on the shingle. She will not die!"

"I am not so sure," I said; "but in any case we should write to her friends. Has she written to any one since she came here?"

"Not to a soul," he answered, eagerly. "She told me she has no friends nearer than Australia. That is a great way off."

"And has she had no letters?" I asked.

"Not one," he replied. "She has neither written nor received a single letter."

"But how did you come across her?" I inquired. "She did not fall from the skies, I suppose. How was it she came to live in this out-of-the-world place with you?"

Tardif smoked his imaginary pipe with great perseverance for some minutes, his face overcast with thought. But presently it cleared, and he turned to me with a frank smile.

"I'll tell you all about it, Dr. Martin," he said. "You know the Seigneur was in London last autumn, and there was a little difficulty in the Court of Chefs Plaids here, about an ordonnance we could not agree over, and I went across to London to see the Seigneur for myself. It was in coming back I met with Mam'zelle Ollivier. I was paying my fare at Waterloo station—the omnibus-fare, I mean—and I was turning away, when I heard the man speak grumblingly. I thought it was at me, and I looked back, and there she stood before him, looking scared and frightened at his rough words. Doctor, I never could bear to see any soft, tender, young thing in trouble. If it's nothing but a little bird that has fallen out of its warm nest, or a lamb slipped down among the cliffs, I feel as if I could risk my life to put them back again in some safe place. Yes, and I have done it scores of times, when I dared not let my poor mother know. Well, there stood mam'zelle, pale and trembling, with the tears ready to fall in her eyes; just such a soft, poor, tender soul as my little wife used to be. You remember my little wife, Dr. Martin?"

I only nodded as he looked at me.

"Just such another," he went on; "only this one was a lady, and less able to take care of herself. Her trouble was nothing but the omnibus-fare, and she had no change, nothing but an Australian sovereign; so I paid it for her. I kept pretty near her about the station while she was buying her ticket, for I overheard two young men, who were roaming up and down, say as they looked at her, 'Pas de gants, et des souliers de velours!' That was true; she had no gloves on her hands, and her little feet had nothing on but some velvet slippers, all wet and muddy with the dirty streets. So I walked up to her, as if I had been her servant, you understand, and put her into a carriage, and stood at the door of it, keeping off any young men who wished to get in—for she was such a pretty young thing—till the train was ready to start, and then I got into the nearest second-class carriage there was to her."

"Well, Tardif?" I said, impatiently, as he paused, looking absently into the dull embers of the seaweed fire.

"I turned it over in my own mind then," he continued, "and I've turned it over in my own mind since, and I can make no sort of an account of it—a young lady travelling without any friends in a dress like that, as if she had not had a minute to spare in getting ready for her journey. It was a bad night for a journey too. Could she be going to see some friend who was dying? At every station I looked out to see if my young lady left the train; but no, not even at Southampton. Was she going on to France? 'I must look out for her at the pier-head,' I said to myself. But when we stopped at the pier I did not want her to think I was watching her, only I stood well in the light, that she might see me when she looked round. I saw her stand as if she was considering, and I moved away very slowly to our boat, to give her the chance of speaking to me, if she wished. But she only followed me very quietly, as if she did not want me to see her, and she went down into the ladies' cabin in a moment, out of sight. Then I thought, 'She is running away from some one, or from something.' She had no shawls, or umbrellas, or baskets, such as ladies are always cumbered with, and that looked strange."

"How was she dressed?" I asked.

"She wore a soft, bright-brown jacket," he answered—"a seal-skin they call it, though I never saw a seal with a skin like that—and a hat like it, and a blue-silk gown, and her little muddy velvet slippers. It was a strange dress for travelling, wasn't it, doctor?"

"Very strange indeed," I repeated. An idea was buzzing about my brain that I had heard a description exactly similar before, but I could not for the life of me recall where. I could not wait to hunt it out then, for Tardif was in a full flow of confidence.

"But my heart yearned to her," he said, "more than ever it did over any bird fallen from its nest, or any lamb that had slipped down the cliffs. All the softness and all the helplessness of every poor little creature I had ever seen in my life seemed about her; all the hunted creatures and all the trapped creatures came to my mind. I can hardly tell you about it, doctor. I could have risked my life a hundred times over for her. It was a rough night, and I kept seeing her pale, hunted-looking face before me, though there was not half the danger I've often been in round our islands. I couldn't keep myself from fancying we were all going down to the bottom of the sea, and that poor young thing, running away from one trouble, was going to meet a worse—if it is worse to die than to live in great trouble. Dr. Martin, they tell me all the bed of the sea out yonder under the Atlantic is a smooth, smooth floor, with no currents, or tides, or streams, but a great calm; and there is no life down there of any kind. Well, that night I seemed to see the dead who have perished by sea lying there calm and quiet with their hands folded across their breasts. A great company it was, and a great graveyard, strewed over with sleeping shapes, all at rest and quiet, waiting till they hear the trumpet of the archangel sounding so that even the dead will hear and live again. It was a solemn sight to see, doctor. Somehow I came to think it would not be altogether a bad thing for the poor young troubled creature to go down there among them and be at rest. There are some people who seem too tender and delicate for this world. Yet if there had come a chance I'd have laid down my life for hers, even then, when I knew nothing much about her."

"Tardif," I said, "I did not know what a good fellow you are, though I ought to have known it by this time."

"No," he answered, "it is not in me; it's something in her. You feel something of it yourself, doctor, or how could you stay in a poor little house like this, thinking of nothing but her, and not caring about the weather keeping you away from home? But let me go on. In the morning she came on deck, and talked to me about the islands, and where she could live cheaply, and it ended in her coming home here to lodge in our little spare room. There was another curious thing—she had not any luggage with her, not a box nor a bag of any kind. She never knew that I knew, for that would have troubled her. It is my belief that she has run away."

"But who can she have run away from, Tardif?" I asked.

"God knows," he answered, "but the girl has suffered; you can see that by her face. Whoever or whatever she has run away from, her cheeks are white from it, and her heart sorrowful. I know nothing of her secret; but this I do know: she is as good, and true, and sweet a little soul as my poor little wife was. She has been here all winter, doctor, living under my eye, and I've waited on her as her servant, though a rough servant I am for one like her. She has tried to make herself cheerful and contented with our poor ways. See, she mended me that bit of net; those are her meshes, though her pretty white fingers were made sore by the twine. She would mend it, sitting where you are now in the chimney-corner. No; if mam'zelle should die, it will be a great grief of heart to me. If I could offer my life to God in place of hers, I'd do it willingly."

"No, she will not die. Look there, Tardif!" I said, pointing to the door-sill of the inner room. A white card had been slipped under the door noiselessly—a signal agreed upon between Mother Renouf and me, to inform me that my patient had at last fallen into a profound slumber, which seemed likely to continue some hours. She had slept perhaps a few minutes at a time before, but not a refreshing, wholesome sleep. Tardif understood the silent signal as well as I did, and a more solemn expression settled on his face. After a while he put away his pipe, and, stepping barefoot across the floor without a sound, he stopped the clock, and brought back to the table, where an oil-lamp was burning, a large old Bible. Throughout the long night, whenever I awoke, for I threw myself on the fern bed and slept fitfully, I saw his handsome face, with its rough, unkempt hair falling across his forehead as it was bent over the book, while his mouth moved silently as he read to himself chapter after chapter, and turned softly the pages before him.

I fell into a heavy slumber just before daybreak, and when I awoke two or three hours after I found that the house had been put in order, just as usual, though no sound had disturbed me. I glanced anxiously at the closed door. That it was closed, and the white card still on the sill, proved to me that our charge had no more been disturbed than myself. The thought struck me that the morning light would shine full upon the weak and weary eyelids of the sleeper; but upon going out into the fold to look at her casement, I discovered that Tardif had been before me and covered it with an old sail. The room within was sufficiently darkened.

The morning was more than half gone before Mother Renouf opened the door and came out to us, her old face looking more haggard than ever, but her little eyes twinkling with satisfaction. She gave me a patronizing nod, but she went up to Tardif, laid a hand on each of his broad shoulders, and looked him keenly in the face.

"All goes well, my friend," she said, significantly. "Your little mam'zelle does not think of going to the good God yet."

I did not stay to watch how Tardif received this news, for I was impatient myself to see how she was going on. Thank Heaven, the fever was gone, the delirium at an end. The dark-gray eyes, opening languidly as my fingers touched her wrist, were calm and intelligent. She was as weak as a kitten, but that did not trouble me much. I was sure her natural health was good, and she would soon recover her lost strength. I had to stoop down to hear what she was saying.

"Have I kept quite still, doctor?" she asked, faintly.

I must own that my eyes smarted, and my voice was not to be trusted. I had never felt so overjoyed in my life as at that moment. But what a singular wish to be obedient possessed this girl! What a wonderful power of submissive self-control! she had cast aside authority and broken away from it, as she had done apparently, there must have been some great provocation before a nature like hers could venture to assert its own independence.

I had ample time for turning over this reflection, for Mother Renouf was worn out and needed rest, and Suzanne Tardif was of little use in the sick-room. I scarcely left my patient all that day, for the rumor I had set afloat the day before was sufficient to make it a difficult task to procure another nurse. The almost childish face grew visibly better before my eyes, and when night came I had to acknowledge somewhat reluctantly that as soon as a boat could leave the island it would be my bounden duty to return to Guernsey.

"I should like to see Tardif," murmured the girl to me that night, after she had awakened from a second long and peaceful sleep.

I called him, and he came in barefoot, his broad, burly frame seeming to fill up all the little room. She could not lift up her head, but her face was turned toward us, and she held out her small, wasted hand to him, smiling faintly. He fell on his knees before he took it into his great, horny palm, and looked down upon it as he held it very carefully with, tears standing in his eyes.

"Why, it is like an egg-shell," he said. "God bless you, mam'zelle, God bless you for getting well again!"

She laughed at his words—a feeble though merry laugh, like a child's—and she seemed delighted with the sight of his hearty face, glowing as it was with happiness. It was a strange chance that had thrown these two together. I could not allow Tardif to remain long; but after that she kept devising little messages to send to him through me whenever I was about to leave her. Her intercourse with Mother Renouf was extremely limited, as the old woman's knowledge of English was slight; and with Suzanne she could hold no conversation at all. It happened, in consequence, that I was the only person who could talk or listen to her through the long and dreary hours.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.

WHO ARE HER FRIENDS?

At another time I might have recognized the danger of my post; but my patient had become so childish-looking, and her mind, enfeebled by delirium, was in so childish a condition, that it seemed to me I little more than tending some young girl whose age was far below my own. I did not trouble myself, moreover, with any exact introspection. There was an under-current of satisfaction and happiness running through the hours which I was not inclined to fathom. The winds continued against me, and I had nothing to do but to devote myself to mam'zelle, as I called her in common with the people about me. She was still so far in a precarious state that, if she had been living in Guernsey, it would have been my duty to pay to her unflagging attention.

But upon Friday afternoon Tardif, who had been down to the Creux Harbor, brought back the information that one of the Sark cutters was about to venture to make the passage across the Channel the next morning, to attend the Saturday market, if the wind did not rise again in the night. It was clear as day what I must do. I must bid farewell to my patient, however reluctant I might be, with a very uncertain prospect of seeing her again. A patient in Sark could not have many visits from a doctor in Guernsey.

She was recovering with the wonderful elasticity of a thoroughly sound constitution; but I had not considered it advisable for her even to sit up yet, with her broken arm and sprained ankle. I took my seat beside her for the last time, her fair, sweet face lying upon the pillow as it had done when I first saw it, only the look of suffering was gone. I had made up my mind to learn something of the mystery that surrounded her; and the child, as I called her to myself, was so submissive to me that she would answer my questions readily.

"Mam'zelle," I said, "I am going away to-night. You will be sorry to lose me?"

"Very, very sorry," she answered, in her low, touching voice. "Are you obliged to go?"

If I had not been obliged to go, I should then and there have made a solemn vow to remain with her till she was well again.

"I must go," I said, shaking off the ridiculous and troublesome idea. "I have been away nearly six days. Six days is a long holiday for a doctor."

"It has not been a holiday for you," she whispered, her eyes fastened upon mine, and shining like clear stars.

"Well," I repeated, "I must go. Before I go I wish to write to your friends for you. You will not be strong enough to write yourself for some days, and it is quite time they knew what danger you have been in. I have brought a pen and paper, and I will post the letter as soon as I reach Guernsey."

A faint flush colored her face, and she turned her eyes away from me.

"Why do you think I ought to write?" she asked at length.

"Because you have been very near death." I answered. "If you had died, not one of us would have known whom to communicate with, unless you had left some direction in that box of yours, which is not very likely."

"No," she said, "you would find nothing there. I suppose if I had died nobody would ever have known who I am. How curious that would have been!"

Was she amused, or was she saddened by the thought? I could not tell.

"It would have been very painful to Tardif and to me," I said. "It must be very painful to your friends, whoever they are, not to know what has become of you. Give me permission to write to them. There can scarcely be reasons sufficient for you to separate yourself from them like this. Besides, you cannot go on living in a fisherman's cottage; you were not born to it—"

"How do you know?" she asked, quickly, with a sharp tone in her voice.

It was somewhat difficult to answer that question. There was nothing to indicate what position she had been used to. I had seen no token of wealth about her room, which was as homely as any other cottage chamber. Her conversation had been the simple, childish talk of an invalid recovering from a serious illness, and had scarcely proved her to be an educated person. Yet there was something in her face and tones and manner which, as plainly to Tardif as to me, stamped this runaway girl as a lady.

"Let me write to your friends," I urged, waiving the question. "It is not fit for you to remain here. I beg of you to allow me to communicate with them."

Her face quivered like a child's when it is partly frightened and partly grieved.

"I have no friends," she said; "not one real friend in the world."

An almost irresistible inclination assailed me to fall on my knees beside her, as I had seen Tardif do, and take a solemn oath to be her faithful servant and friend as long as my life should last. This, of course, I did not do; but the sound of the words so plaintively spoken, and the sight of her quivering face, rendered her a hundredfold more interesting to me.

"Mam'zelle," I said, taking her hand in mine, "if ever you should need a friend, you may count upon Martin Dobrée as one as true as any you could wish to have. Tardif is another. Never say again you have no friends."

"Thank you," she answered, simply. "I will count you and Tardif as my friends. But I have no others, so you need not write to anybody."

"But what if you had died?" I persisted.

"You would have buried me quietly up there," she answered, "in the pleasant graveyard, where the birds sing all day long, and I should have been forgotten soon. Am I likely to die, Dr. Martin?"

"Certainly not," I replied, hastily; "nothing of the kind. You are going to get well and strong again. But I must bid you good-by, now, since you have no friends to write to. Can I do any thing for you in Guernsey? I can send you any thing you fancy."

"I do not want any thing," she said.

"You want a great number of things," I said; "medicines, of course—what is the good of a doctor who sends no medicine?—and books. You will have to keep yourself quiet a long time. You would like some books?"

"Oh, I have longed for books," she said, sighing; "but don't buy any; lend me some of your own."

"Mine would be very unsuitable for a young lady," I answered, laughing at the thought of my private library. "May I ask why I am not to buy any?"

"Because I have no money to spend in books," she said.

"Well," I replied, "I will borrow some for you from the ladies I know. We will not waste our money, neither you nor I."

I stood looking at her, finding it harder to go away than I had supposed. So closely had I watched the changes upon her face, that every line of it was deeply engraved upon my memory. Other and more familiar faces seemed to have faded in proportion to that distinctness of impression. Julia's features, for instance, had become blurred and obscure, like a painting which has lost its original clearness of tone.

"How soon will you come back again?" asked the faint, plaintive voice.

Clearly it did not occur to her that I could not pay her a visit without great difficulty. I knew how it was next to an impossibility to get over to Sark, for some time at least; but I felt ready to combat even impossibilities.

"I will come back," I said—"yes, I promise to come back in a week's time. Make haste and get well before then, mam'zelle. Good-by, now; good-by."

I was going to sleep at Vaudin's Inn, near to Creux Harbor, from which the cutter would sail almost before the dawn. At five o'clock we started on oar passage—a boat-load of fishermen bound for the market. The cold was sharp, for it was still early in March, and the easterly wind pierced the skin like a myriad of fine needles. A waning moon was hanging in the sky over Guernsey, and the east was growing gray with the coming morning. By the time the sun was fairly up out of its bed of low-lying clouds, we had rounded the southern point of Sark, and were in sight of the Havre Gosselin. But Tardif's cottage was screened by the cliffs, and I could catch no glimpse of it, though, as we rowed onward, I saw a fine, thin column of white smoke blown toward us. It was from his hearth, I knew, and, at this moment, he was preparing an early breakfast for my invalid. I watched it till all the coast became an indistinct outline against the sky.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.

THE SIXTIES OF GUERNSEY.

I was more than half-numb with cold by the time we landed at the quay, opposite the Sark office. The place was all alive, seeming the more busy and animated to me for the solitary six days I had been spending since last Sunday. The arrival of our boat, and especially my appearance in it, created quite a stir among the loungers who are always hanging about the pier. By this time every individual in St. Peter-Port knew that Dr. Martin Dobrée had been missing for several days, having gone out in a fisherman's boat to Sark the Sunday before. I had seen myself in the glass before leaving my chamber at Vaudin's, and to some extent I presented the haggard appearance of a shipwrecked man. A score of voices greeted me; some welcoming, some chaffing. "Glad to see you again, old fellow!" "What news from Sark?" "Been in quod for a week?" "His hair is not cut short!" "No; he has tarried in Sark till his beard be grown!" There was a circling laugh at this last jest at my appearance, which had been uttered by a good-tempered, jovial clergyman, who was passing by on his way to the town church. I did my best to laugh and banter in return, but it was like a bear dancing with a sore head. I felt gloomy and uncomfortable. A change had come over me since I left home, for my return was by no means an unmixed pleasure.

As I was proceeding along the quay, with a train of sympathizing attendants, a man, who was driving a large cart piled with packages in cases, as if they had come in from England by the steamer, touched his hat to me, and stopped the horse. It was in order to inform me that he was conveying furniture which we—that is, Julia and I—had ordered, up to our new house, the windows of which I could see glistening in the morning sun. My spirits did not rise, even at this cheerful information. I looked coldly at the cases, bade the man go on, and shook off my train by taking an abrupt turn up a flight of steps, leading directly into the Haute Rue.

I had chosen instinctively the nearest by-way homeward, but, once in the Haute Rue, I did not pursue it. I turned again upon a sudden thought toward the Market Square, to see if I could pick up any dainties to tempt the delicate appetite of my Sark patient. Every step I took brought me into contact with some friend or acquaintance, whom I would have avoided gladly. The market was sure to be full of them, for the ladies of Guernsey, like Frenchwomen, would be there in shoals, with their maidservants behind them to carry their purchases. Yet I turned toward it, as I said, braving both congratulations and curiosity, to see what I could buy for Tardif's "mam'zelle."

The square had all the peculiar animation of an early market where ladies do their own bargaining. As I had known beforehand, most of my acquaintances were there; for in Guernsey the feminine element predominates terribly, and most of my acquaintances were ladies. The peasant-women behind the stalls also knew me. Most of them nodded to me as I strolled slowly through the crowd, but they were much too busy to suspend their purchases in order to catechise me just then, being sure of me at a future time. I had not done badly in choosing the busiest street for my way home.

But as I left the Market Square I came suddenly upon Julia, face to face. It had all the effect of a shock upon me. Like many other women, she seldom looked well out-of-doors. The prevailing fashion never suited her, however the bonnets were worn, whether hanging down the neck or slouched over the forehead, rising spoon-shaped toward the sky, or lying like a flat plate on the crown. Julia's bonnet always looked as if it had been made for somebody else. She was fond of wearing a shawl, which hung ungracefully about her, and made her figure look squarer and her shoulders higher than they really were. Her face struck sharply upon my brain, as if I had never seen it distinctly before; not a bad face, but unmistakably plain, and just now with a frown upon it, and her heavy eyebrows knitted forbiddingly. A pretty little basket was in her hand, and her mind was full of the bargains she was bent upon. She was even more surprised and startled by our encounter than I was, and her manner, when taken by surprise, was apt to be abrupt.

"Why, Martin!" she ejaculated.

"Well, Julia!" I said.

We stood looking at one another much in the same way as we used to do years before, when she had detected me in some boyish prank, and assumed the mentor while I felt a culprit. How really I felt a culprit at that moment she could not guess.

"I told you just how it would be," she said, in her mentor voice. "I knew there was a storm coming, and I begged and entreated of you not to go. Your mother has been ill all the week, and your father has been as cross as—as—"

"As two sticks," I suggested, precisely as I might have done when I was thirteen.

"It is nothing to laugh at," said Julia, severely. "I shall say nothing about myself and my own feelings, though they have been most acute, the wind blowing a hurricane for twenty-four hours together, and we not sure that you had even reached Sark in safety. Your mother and I wanted to charter the Rescue, and send her over to fetch you home as soon as the worst of the storm was over, but my uncle pooh-poohed it."

"I am very glad he did," I replied, involuntarily.

"He said you would be more than ready to come back in the first cutter that sailed," she went on. "I suppose you have just come in?"

"Yes," I said, "and I'm half numbed with cold, and nearly famished with hunger. You don't give me as good a welcome as the Prodigal Son got, Julia."

"No," she answered, softening a little; "but I'm not sorry to see you safe again. I would turn back with you, but I like to do the marketing myself, for the servants will buy any thing. Martin, a whole cartload of our furniture is come in. You will find the invoice inside my davenport. We must go down this afternoon and superintend the unpacking."

"Very well," I said; "but I cannot stay longer now."

I did not go on with any lighter heart than before this meeting with Julia. I had scrutinized her face, voice, and manner, with unwonted criticism. As a rule, a face that has been before us all our days is as seldom an object of criticism as any family portrait which has hung against the same place on the wall all our lifetime. The latter fills up a space which would otherwise be blank; the former does very little else. It never strikes you; it is almost invisible to you. There would be a blank space left if it disappeared, and you could not fill it up from memory. A phantom has been living, breathing, moving beside you, with vanishing features and no very real presence.

I had, therefore, for the first time criticised my future wife. It was a good, honest, plain, sensible face, with some fine, insidious lines about the corners of the eyes and lips, and across the forehead. They could hardly be called wrinkles yet, but they were the first faint sketch of them, and it is impossible to obliterate the slightest touch etched by Time. She was five years older than I—thirty-three last birthday. There was no more chance for our Guernsey girls to conceal their age than for the unhappy daughters of peers, whose dates are faithfully kept, and recorded in the Peerage. The upper classes of the island, who were linked together by endless and intricate ramifications of relationship, formed a kind of large family, with some of its advantages and many of its drawbacks. In one sense we had many things in common; our family histories were public property, as also our private characters and circumstances. For instance, my own engagement to Julia, and our approaching marriage, gave almost as much interest to the island as though we were members of each household.

I have looked out a passage in the standard work upon the Channel Islands. They are the words of an Englishman who was studying us more philosophically than we imagined. Unknown to ourselves we had been under his microscope. "At a period not very distant, society in Guernsey grouped itself into two divisions—one, including those families who prided themselves on ancient descent and landed estates, and who regarded themselves as the pur sang; and the other, those whose fortunes had chiefly been made during the late war or in trade. The former were called Sixties, the latter were the Forties."

Now Julia and I belonged emphatically to the Sixties. We had never been debased by trade, and a mésalliance was not known in our family. To be sure, my father had lost a fortune instead of making one in any way; but that did not alter his position or mine. We belonged to the aristocracy of Guernsey, and noblesse oblige. As for my marriage with Julia, it was so much the more interesting as the number of marriageable men was extremely limited; and she was considered favored indeed by Fate, which had provided for her a cousin willing to settle down for life in the island.

Still more greetings, more inquiries, more jokes, as I wended my way homeward. I had become very weary of them before I turned into our own drive. My father was just starting off on horseback. He looked exceedingly well on horseback, being a very handsome man, and in excellent preservation. His hair, as white as snow, was thick and well curled, and his face almost without a wrinkle. He had married young, and was not more than twenty-five years older than myself. He stopped, and extended two fingers to me.

"So you are back, Martin?" he said. "It has been a confounded nuisance, you being out of the way; and such weather for a man of my years! I had to ride out three miles to lance a baby's gums, confound it! in all that storm on Tuesday. Mrs. Durande has been very ill too; all your patients have been troublesome. But it must have been awfully dull work for you out yonder. What did you do with yourself, eh? Make love to some of the pretty Sark girls behind Julia's back, eh?"

My father kept himself young, as he was very fond of stating; his style of conversation was eminently so. It jarred upon my ears more than ever after Tardif's grave and solemn words, and often deep thoughts. I was on the point of answering sharply, but I checked myself.

"The weather has been awful," I said. "How did my mother bear it?"

"She has been like an old hen clucking after her duckling in the water," he replied. "She has been fretting and fuming after you all the week. If it had been me out in Sark, she would have slept soundly and ate heartily; as it was you, she has neither slept nor ate. You are quite an old woman's pet, Martin. As for me, there is no love lost between old women and me."

"Good-morning, sir," I said, turning away, and hurrying on to the house. I heard him laugh lightly, and hum an opera-air as he rode off, sitting his horse with the easy seat of a thorough horseman. He would never set up a carriage as long as he could ride like that. I watched him out of sight, and then went in to seek my poor mother.

CHAPTER THE NINTH.

A CLEW TO THE SECRET.

She was lying on the sofa in the breakfast-room, with the Venetian blinds down to darken the morning sunshine. Her eyes wore closed, though she held in her hands the prayer-hook, from which she had been reading as usual the Psalms for the day. I had time to take note of the extreme fragility of her appearance, which, doubtless I noticed the more plainly for my short absence. Her hands were very thin, and her cheeks hollow. A few silver threads were growing among her brown hair, and a line or two between her eyebrows were becoming deeper. But while I was looking at her, though I made no sort of sound or movement, she seemed to feel that I was there; and after looking up she started from her sofa, and flung her arms about me, pressing closer and closer to me.

"O Martin, my boy! my darling!" she sobbed, "thank God you are come back safe! Oh, I have been very rebellious, very unbelieving. I ought to have known that you would be safe. Oh, I am thankful!"

"So am I, mother," I said, kissing her, "and very hungry into the bargain."

I knew that would check her hysterical excitement. She looked up at me with smiles and tears on her face; but the smiles won the day.

"That is so like you, Martin," she said; "I believe your ghost would say those very words. You are always hungry when you come home. Well, my boy shall have the best breakfast in Guernsey. Sit down, then, and let me wait upon you."

That was just what pleased her most whenever I came in from some ride into the country. She was a woman with fondling, caressing little ways, such as Julia could no more perform gracefully than an elephant could waltz. My mother enjoyed fetching my slippers, and warming them herself by the fire, and carrying away my boots when I took them off. No servant was permitted to do any of these little offices for me—that is, when my father was out of the way. If he was there, my mother sat still, and left me to wait on myself, or ring for a servant, Never in my recollection had she done any thing of the kind for my father. Had she watched and waited upon him thus in the early days of their married life, until some neglect or unfaithfulness of his had cooled her love for him? I sat down as she bade me, and had my slippers brought, and felt her fingers passed fondly through my hair.

"You have come back like a barbarian," she said, "rougher than Tardif himself. How have you managed, my boy? You must tell me all about it as soon as your hunger is satisfied."

"As soon as I have had my breakfast, mother, I must put up a few things in a hamper to go back by the Sark cutter," I answered.

"What sort of things?" she asked. "Tell me, and I will be getting them ready for you."

"Well, there will be some physic, of course," I said; "you cannot help me in that. But you can find things suitable for a delicate appetite; jelly, you know, and jams, and marmalade; any thing nice that comes to hand. And some good port-wine, and a few amusing books."

"Books!" echoed my mother.

I recollected at once that the books she might select, as being suited to a Sark peasant, would hardly prove interesting to my patient. I could not do better than go down to Barbet's circulating library, and look out some good works there.

"Well, no," I said; "never mind the books. If you will look out the other things, those can wait."

"Whom are they for?" asked my mother.

"For my patient," I replied, devoting myself to the breakfast before me.

"What sort of a patient, Martin?" she inquired again.

"Her name is Ollivier," I said. "A common name. Our postmaster's name is Ollivier."

"Oh, yes," she answered; "I know several families of Olliviers. I dare say I should know this person if you could tell me her Christian name. Is it Jane, or Martha, or Rachel?"

"I don't know," I said; "I did not ask."

Should I tell my mother about my mysterious patient? I hesitated for a minute or two. But to what good? It was not my habit to talk about my patients and their ailments. I left them all behind me when I crossed the threshold of home. My mother's brief curiosity had been satisfied with the name of Ollivier, and she made no further inquiries about her. But to expedite me in my purpose, she rang, and gave orders for old Pellet, our only man-servant, to find a strong hamper, and told the cook to look out some jars of preserve.

The packing of that hamper interested me wonderfully; and my mother, rather amazed at my taking the superintendence of it in person, stood by me in her store-closet, letting me help myself liberally. There was a good space left after I had taken sufficient to supply Miss Ollivier with good things for some weeks to come. If my mother had not been by, I should have filled it up with books.

"Give me a loaf or two of white bread," I said; "the bread at Tardif's is coarse and hard, as I know after eating it for a week. A loaf, if you please, dear mother."

"Whatever are you doing here, Martin?" exclaimed Julia's unwelcome voice behind me. Her bilious attack had not quite passed away, and her tones were somewhat sharp and raspy.

"He has been living on Tardif's coarse fare for a week," answered my mother; "so now he has compassion enough for his Sark patient to pack up some dainties for her. If you could only give him one or two of your bad headaches, he would have more sympathy for you."

"Have you had one of your headaches, Julia?" I inquired.

"The worst I ever had," she answered. "It was partly your going off in that rash way, and the storm that came on after, and the fright we were in. You must not think of going again, Martin. I shall take care you don't go after we are married."

Julia had been used to speak out as calmly about our marriage as if it was no more than going to a picnic. It grated upon me just then; though it had been much the same with myself. There was no delightful agitation about the future that lay before us. We were going to set up housekeeping by ourselves, and that was all. There was no mystery in it; no problem to be solved; no discovery to be made on either side. There would be no Blue Beard's chamber in our dwelling. We had grown up together; now we had agreed to grow old together. That was the sum total of marriage to Julia and me.

I finished packing the hamper, and sent Pellet with it to the Sark office, having addressed it to Tardif, who had engaged to be down at the Creux Harbor to receive it when the cutter returned. Then I made a short and hurried toilet, which by this time had become essential to my reappearance in civilized society. But I was in haste to secure a parcel of books before the cutter should start home again, with its courageous little knot of market-people. I ran down to Barbet's, scarcely heeding the greetings which were flung after mo by every passer-by. I looked through the library-shelves with growing dissatisfaction, until I hit upon two of Mrs. Gaskell's novels, "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austin, and "David Copperfield." Besides these, I chose a book for Sunday reading, as my observations upon my mother and Julia had taught me that my patient could not read a novel on a Sunday with a quiet conscience.

Barbet brought half a sheet of an old Times to form the first cover of my parcel. The shop was crowded with market-people, and, as he was busy, I undertook to pack them myself, the more willingly as I had no wish for him to know what direction I wrote upon them. I was about to fold the newspaper round them, when my eye was caught by an advertisement at the top of one of the columns, the first line of which was printed in capitals. I recollected in an instant that I had seen it and read it before. This was what I had tried in vain to recall while Tardif was describing Miss Ollivier to me. "Strayed from her home in London, on the 20th inst., a young lady with bright-brown hair, gray eyes, and delicate features; age twenty one. She is believed to have been alone. Was dressed in a blue-silk dress, and seal-skin jacket and hat. Fifty pounds reward is offered to any person giving such information as will lead to her restoration to her friends. Apply to Messrs. Scott and Brown, Gray's Inn Road, E.C."

I stood perfectly still for some seconds, staring blankly at the very simple, direct advertisement under my eyes. There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that it had a direct reference to my pretty patient in Sark. I had a reason for recollecting the date of Tardif's return from London, the very day after the mournful disaster off the Havre Gosselin, when four gentlemen and a boatman had been lost during a squall. But I had no time for deliberation then, and I tore off a large corner of the Times containing that and other advertisements, and thrust it unseen into my pocket. After that I went on with my work, and succeeded in turning out a creditable-looking parcel, which I carried down to the Sark cutter.

Before I returned home I made two or three half-professional calls upon patients whom my father had visited during my absence. Everywhere I had to submit to numerous questions as to my adventures and pursuits during my week's exile. At each place curiosity seemed to be quite satisfied with the information that the young woman who had been hurt by a fall from the cliffs was an Ollivier. With that freedom and familiarity which exists among us, I was rallied for my evident absence and preoccupation of mind, which were pleasantly ascribed to the well-known fact that a large quantity of furniture for our new house had arrived from England while I was away. These friends of mine could tell me the colors of the curtains, and the patterns of the carpets, and the style of my chairs and tables; so engrossingly interesting to all our circle was our approaching marriage.

In the mean time, I had no leisure to study and ponder over the advertisement, which by so odd a chance had come into my hands. That must be reserved till I was alone at night.

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

JULIA'S WEDDING-DRESS.

Yet I found my attention wandering, and my wits wool-gathering, even in the afternoon, when I had gone down with Julia and my mother to the new house, to see after the unpacking of that load of furniture. I can imagine circumstances in which nothing could be more delightful than the care with which a man prepares a home for his future wife. The very tint of the walls, and the way the light falls in through the windows, would become matters of grave importance. In what pleasant spot shall her favorite chair be placed? And what picture shall hang opposite it to catch her eye the oftenest? Where is her piano to stand? What china, and glass, and silver, is she to use? Where are the softest carpets to be found for her feet to tread? In short, where is the very best and daintiest of every thing to be had, for the best and daintiest little bride the sun ever shone on?

There was not the slightest flavor of this sentiment in our furnishing of our new house. It was really more Julia's business than mine. We had had dozens of furnishing lists to peruse from the principal houses in London and Paris, as if even there it was a well-understood thing that Julia and I were going to be married. We had toiled through these catalogues, making pencil-marks in them, as though they were catalogues of an art exhibition. We had prudently settled the precise sum (of Julia's money) which we were to lay out. Julia's taste did not often agree with mine, as she had no eye for the harmonies of color—a singular deficiency among us, as most of the Guernsey women are born artists. We were constantly compelled to come to a compromise, each yielding some point; not without a secret misgiving on my part that the new house would have many an eyesore about it for me. But then it was Julia's money that was doing it, and after all she was more anxious to please me than I deserved.

That afternoon Pellet and I, like two assistants in a furnishing-house, unrolled carpets and stretched them along the floors before the critical gaze of my mother and Julia. We unpacked chairs and tables, scanning anxiously for damages on the polished wood, and setting them one after another in a row against the walls. I went about as in some dream. The house commanded a splendid view of the whole group of the Channel Islands, and the rocky islets innumerable strewed about the sea. The afternoon sun was shining full upon Sark, and whenever I looked through the window I could see the cliffs of the Havre Gosselin, purple in the distance, with a silver thread of foam at their foot. No wonder that my thoughts wandered, and the words my mother and Julia were speaking went in at one ear and out at the other. Certainly I was dreaming; but which part was the dream?

"I don't believe he cares a straw about the carpets!" exclaimed Julia, in a disappointed tone.

"I do indeed, dear Julia," I said, bringing myself back to the carpets. Here I had been obliged to give in to Julia's taste. She had set her mind upon having flowers in her drawing-room carpet, and there they were, large garlands of bright-colored blossoms, very gay, and, as I ventured to remark to myself, very gaudy.

"You like it better than you did in the pattern?" she asked, anxiously.

I did not like it one whit better, but I should have been a brute if I had said so. She was gazing at it and me with so troubled an expression, that I felt it necessary to set her mind at ease.

"It is certainly handsomer than the pattern?" I said, regarding it attentively; "very much handsomer."

"You like it better than the plain thing you chose at first?" pursued Julia.

I was about to be hunted into a corner, and forced into denying my own taste—a process almost more painful than denying one's faith—when my mother came to my rescue. She could read us both as an open book, and knew the precise moment to come between us.

"Julia, my love," she said, "remember that we wish to show Martin those patterns while it is daylight. To-morrow is Sunday, you know."

A little tinge of color crept over Julia's tintless face as she told Pellet he might go. I almost wished that I might be dismissed too; but it was only a vague, wordless wish. We then drew near to the window, from which we could see Sark so clearly, and Julia drew out of her pocket a very large envelope, which was bursting with its contents.

They were small scraps of white silk and white satin. I took them mechanically into my hand, and could not help admiring the pure, lustrous, glossy beauty of them. I passed my fingers over them softly. There was something in the sight of them that moved me, as if they were fragments of the shining garments of some vision, which in times gone by, when I was much younger, had now and then floated before my fancy. I did not know any one lovely enough to wear raiment of glistening white like these, unless—unless—. A passing glimpse of the pure white face, and glossy hair, and deep gray eyes of my Sark patient flashed across me.

"They are patterns for Julia's wedding-dress," said my mother, in a low, tender voice.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH.

TRUE TO BOTH.

"For Julia!" I repeated, the treacherous vision fading away instantaneously. "Oh, yes! I understand. They are very beautiful—very beautiful indeed."

"Which do you like most?" asked Julia, in a whisper, as she leaned against my shoulder.

"I like them all," I said. "There is scarcely any difference among them that I can see."

"No difference!" she exclaimed. "That is so like a man! Why, they are as different as can be. Look here, this one is only five shillings a yard, and that is twelve. Isn't that a difference?"

"A very great one," I replied. "But do you think you will look well in white, my dear Julia? You never do wear white."

"A bride cannot wear any thing but white," she said, angrily. "I declare, Martin, you would not mind if I looked a perfect fright."

"But I should mind very much," I urged, putting my arm around her; "for you will be my wife then, Julia."

She smiled almost for the first time that afternoon, for her mind had been full of the furniture, and too burdened for happiness. But now she looked happy.

"You can be as nice and good as any one, when you like," she said, gently.

"I shall always be nice and good when we are married," I answered, with a laugh. "You are not afraid of venturing, are you, Julia?"

"Not the least in the world," she said. "I know you, Martin, and I can trust you implicitly."

My heart ached at the words, so softly and warmly spoken. But I laughed again—at myself this time, not at her. Why should she not trust me? I would be as true as steel to her. I loved no one better, and I would take care not to love any one. My word, my honor, my troth, were all plighted to her. Only a scoundrel and a fool would be unfaithful to an engagement like ours.

We walked home together, we three, all contented and all happy. We had a good deal to talk of during the evening, and sat up late. Sundry small events had happened in Guernsey during my six-days' absence, and these were discussed with that charming minuteness with which women canvass family matters. It was midnight before I found myself alone in my own room.

I had half forgotten the crumpled paper in my waistcoat-pocket, but now I smoothed it out before me and pondered over every word. No, there could not be a doubt that it referred to Miss Ollivier. "Bright-brown hair, gray eyes, and delicate features." That exactly corresponded with her appearance. "Blue-silk dress, and seal-skin jacket and hat." It was precisely the dress which Tardif had described. "Fifty pounds reward." That was a large sum to offer, and the inference was that her friends were persons of good means, and anxious for her recovery.

Why should she have strayed from home? That was the question. What possible reason could there have been, strong enough to impel a young and delicately-nurtured girl to run all the risks and dangers of a flight alone and unprotected? Her friends evidently believed that she had not been run away with; there was not the ordinary element of an elopement in this case.

But Miss Ollivier had assured me she had no friends. What did she mean by the word? Here were persons evidently anxious to discover her place of concealment. Were they friends? or could they by any chance be enemies? This is not an age when enmity is very rampant. For my own part, I had not an enemy in the world. Why should this pretty, habitually-obedient, self-controlled girl have any? Most probably it was one of those instances of bitter misunderstanding which sometimes arise in families, and which had driven her to the desperate step of seeking peace and quietness by flight.

Then what ought I to do with this advertisement, thrust, as it would seem, purposely under my notice? If I had not wrapped up the parcel myself at Barbet's, I should have missed seeing it; or if Barbet had picked up any other piece of paper, it would not have come under my eye. A curious concatenation of very trivial circumstances had ended in putting into my hands a clew by which I could unravel all the mystery about my Sark patient. What was I to do with the clew?

I might communicate at once with Messrs. Scott and Brown, giving them the information they had advertised for six months before, and receive a reply, stating that it was no longer valuable to them, or containing an acknowledgment of my claim to the fifty pounds reward. I might sell my knowledge of Miss Ollivier for fifty pounds. In doing so I might render her a great service, by restoring her to her proper sphere in society. But the recollection of Tardif's description of her as looking terrified and hunted recurred vividly to me. The advertisement put her age as twenty-one. I should not have judged her so old myself, especially since her hair had been cut short. But if she was twenty-one, she was old enough to form plans and purposes for herself, and to choose, as far as she could, her own mode of living. I was not prepared to deliver her up, until I knew something more of both sides of the question.

Settled—that if I could see Messrs. Scot and Brown, and learn something about Miss Ollivier's friends, I might be then able to decide whether I would betray her to them but I would not write. Also, that I must see her again first, and once more urge her to have confidence in me. If she would trust me with her secret, I would be as true to her as a friend as I meant to be true to Julia.

Having come to these conclusions, I cut the advertisement carefully out of the crumpled paper, and placed it in my pocket-book with portraits of my mother and Julia, Here were mementos of the three women I cared most for in the world: my mother first, Julia second, and my mysterious patient third.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH.

STOLEN WATERS ARE SWEET.

I was neither in good spirits nor in good temper during the next few days. My mother and Julia appeared astonished at this, for I was not ordinarily as touchy and fractious as I showed myself immediately after my sojourn in Sark.

I was ashamed of it myself. The new house, which occupied their time and thoughts so agreeably, worried me as it had not done before. I made every possible excuse not to be sent to it, or taken to it, several times a day.

The discussions over Julia's wedding-dress also, which had by no means been decided upon on Saturday afternoon, began to bore me beyond words. Whenever I could, I made my patients a pretext for getting away from them.

One of them, a cousin of my mother—as I have said, we were all cousins of one degree or another—Captain Carey, met me on the quay, a day or two after my return. He had been a commander in the Royal Navy, and, after cruising about in all manner of unhealthy latitudes, had returned to his native island for the recovery of his health. He and his sister lived together in a very pleasant house of their own, in the Vale, about two miles from St. Peter-Port.

He looked yellow enough to be on the verge of an attack of jaundice when he came across me.

"Hallo, Martin!" he cried, "I am delighted to see you, my boy. I've been a little out of sorts lately; but I would not let Johanna send for your father. He does very well to go dawdling after women, and playing with their pulses, but I don't want him dawdling after me. Tell me what you have to say about me, my lad."

He went on to tell me his symptoms, while a sudden idea struck me almost like a flash of genius.

I am nothing of a genius; but at that time new thoughts came into my mind with wonderful rapidity. It was positively necessary that I should run over to Sark this week—I had given my word to Miss Ollivier that I would do so—but I dared not mention such a project at home. My mother and Julia would be up in arms at the first syllable I uttered.

What if I could do two patients good at one stroke, kill two birds with one stone? Captain Carey had a pretty little yacht lying idle in St. Sampson's Harbor, and a day's cruising would do him all the good in the world. Why should he not carry me over to Sark, when I could visit my other patient, and nobody be made miserable by the trip?

"I will make you up some of your old medicine," I said, "but I strongly recommend you to have a day out on the water; seven or eight hours at any rate. If the weather keeps as fine as it is now, it will do you a world of good."

"It is so dreary alone," he objected, "and Johanna would not care to go out at this season, I know."

"If I could manage it," I said, deliberating, "I should be glad to have a day with you."

"Ah! if you could do that!" he replied, eagerly.

"I'll see about it," I said. "Should you mind where you sailed to?"

"Not at all, not at all, my boy," he answered, "so that I get your company. You shall be skipper, or helmsman, or both, if you like."

"Well, then," I replied, "you might take me over to the Havre Gosselin, to see how my patient's broken arm is going on. It's a bore there being no resident medical man there at this moment. The accident last autumn was a great loss to the island."

"Ah! poor fellow!" said Captain Carey, "he was a sad loss to them. But I'll take you over with pleasure, Martin; any day you fix upon."

"Get the yacht ship-shape, then," I said; "I think I can manage it on Thursday."

I did not say at home whither I was bound on Thursday. I informed them merely that Captain Carey and I were going out in his yacht for a few hours. This was simply to prevent them from worrying themselves.

It was as delicious a spring morning as ever I remember. As I rode along the flat shore between St. Peter-Port and St. Sampson's, the fresh air from the sea played about my face, as if to drive dull care away, and make me as buoyant and debonair as itself. The little waves were glittering and dancing in the sunshine, and chiming with the merry carols of the larks, outsinging one another in the blue sky overhead. The numerous wind-mills, like children's toys, which were pumping water out of the stone-quarries, whirled and spun busily in the brisk breeze. Every person I met saluted me with a blithe and cheery greeting. My dull spirits had been blown far away before I set foot on the deck of Captain Carey's little yacht.

The run over was all that we could wish. The cockle-shell of a boat, belonging to the yacht, bore me to the foot of the ladder hanging down the rock at Havre Gosselin. A very few minutes took me to the top of the cliff, and there lay the little thatched, nest-like home of my patient. I hastened forward eagerly.

The place seemed very solitary and deserted; and a sudden fear came across me. Was it possible that she should be dead? It was possible. I had left her six days ago only just over a terrible crisis. There might have been a relapse, a failure of vital force. I might be come to find those shining eyes hid beneath their lids forever, and the pale, suffering face motionless in death.

Certainly the rhythmic motion of my heart was disturbed. I felt it contract painfully, and its beating suspended for a moment or two. The farmstead was intensely quiet, with the ominous stillness of death. All the windows were shrouded with their check curtains. There was no clatter of Suzanne's wooden clogs about the fold or the kitchen. If it had been Sunday, this supernatural silence would have been easily accounted for; but it was Thursday. I scarcely dared go on and learn the cause of it.

All silent still as I crossed the stony causeway of the yard. Not a face looked out from door or window. Mam'zelle's casement stood a little way open, and the breeze played with the curtains, fluttering them like banners in a procession. I dared not try to look in. The house-door was ajar, and I approached it cautiously. "Thank God!" I cried within myself as I gazed eagerly into the cottage.

She was lying there upon the fern-bed, half asleep, her head fallen back upon the pillow, and the book she had been reading dropped from her hand. Her dress was of some coarse, dark-green stuff, which made a charming contrast to her delicate face and bright hair. The whole interior of the cottage formed a picture. The old furniture of oak, almost black with age, the neutral tints of the wall and ceiling, and the deep tone of her green dress, threw out into strong relief the graceful, shining head, and pale face.

I suppose she became subtly conscious, as women always are, that somebody's eyes were fixed upon her, for she awoke fully, and looked up as I lingered on the door-sill.

"O Dr. Martin!" she cried, "I am so glad!"

She looked pleased enough to be upon the point of trying to raise herself up in order to welcome me, but I interposed quickly. It was more difficult than I had expected to assume a grave, professional tone, but by an effort I did so. I bade her lie still, and took a chair at some little distance.

"Tardif is gone out fishing," she said, "and his mother is gone away too, to a christening-feast somewhere; but Mrs. Renouf is to be here in an hour or two. I told them I could manage very well as long as that."

"They ought not to have left you alone," I replied.

"And I shall not be left alone," she said, smiling, "for you are come, you see. I am rather glad they are away; for I wanted to tell you how much I felt your goodness to me all through that dreadful week. You are the first doctor I ever had about me, the very first. Perhaps you thought I did not know what care you were taking of me; but, somehow or other, I knew every thing. My mind did not quite go. You were very, very good to me."

"Never mind that," I said; "I am come to see how my work is going on. How is the arm, first of all?"

I almost wished that Mother Renouf or Suzanne Tardif had been at hand. But Miss Ollivier seemed perfectly composed, as much so as a child. She looked like one with her cropped head of hair, and frank, open face. My own momentary embarrassment passed away. The arm was going on all right, and so was Mother Renouf's charge, the sprained ankle.

"We must take care you are not lame," I said, while I was feeling carefully the complicated joint of her ankle.

"Lame!" she repeated, in an alarmed voice, "is there any fear of that?"

"Not much," I answered, "but we must be careful, mam'zelle. You must promise me not to set your foot on the ground, or in any way rest your weight upon it, till I give you leave."

"That means that you will have to come to see me again," she said; "is it not very difficult to come over from Guernsey?"

"Not at all," I answered, "it is quite a treat to me."

Her face grew very grave, as if she was thinking of some unpleasant topic. She looked at me earnestly and questioningly.

"May I speak to you with great plainness, Dr. Martin?" she asked.

"Speak precisely what is in your mind at this moment," I replied.

"You are very, very good to me," she said, holding out her hand to me, "but I do not want you to come more often than is quite necessary, because I am very poor. If I were rich," she went on hurriedly, "I should like you to come every day—it is so pleasant—but I can never pay you sufficiently for that long week you were here. So please do not visit me oftener than is quite necessary."

My face felt hot, but I scarcely knew what to say. I bungled out an answer:

"I would not take any money from you, and I shall come to see you as often as I can."

I bound up her little foot again without another word, and then sat down, pushing my chair farther from her.

"You are not offended with me, Dr. Martin?" she asked, in a pleading tone.

"No," I answered; "but you are mistaken in supposing that a medical man has no love for his profession apart from its profits. To see that your arm gets properly well is part of my duty, and I shall fulfil it without any thought of whether I shall get paid for it or no."

"Now," she said, "I must let you know how poor I am. Will you please to fetch me my box out of my room?"

I was only too glad to obey her. This seemed to be an opening to a complete confidence between us. Now I came to think of it, Fortune had favored me in thus throwing us together alone.

I lifted the small, light box very easily—there could not be many treasures in it—and carried it back to her. She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked it with some difficulty, but she could not raise the lid without my help. I took care not to offer any assistance until she asked it.

Yes, there were very few possessions in that light trunk, but the first glance showed me a blue-silk dress, and seal-skin jacket and hat. I lifted them out for her, and after them a pair of velvet slippers, soiled, as if they had been through muddy roads. I did not utter a remark. Beneath these lay a handsome watch and chain, a fine diamond ring, and five sovereigns lying loose in the box.

"That is all the money I have in the world," she said, sadly.

I laid the five sovereigns in her small, white hand, and she turned them over, one after another, with a pitiful look on her face. I felt foolish enough to cry over them myself.

"Dr. Martin," was her unexpected question after a long pause, "do you know what became of my hair?"

"Why?" I asked, looking at her fingers running through the short curls we had left her.

"Because that ought to be sold for something," she said. "I am almost glad you had it cut off. My hair-dresser told me once he would give five guineas for a head of hair like mine, it was so long and the color was uncommon. Five guineas would not be half enough to pay you though, I know."

She spoke so simply and quietly, that I did not attempt to remonstrate with her about her anxiety to pay me.

"Tardif has it," I said; "but of course he will give it you back again. Shall I sell it for you, mam'zelle?"

"Oh, that is just what I could not ask you!" she exclaimed. "You see there is no one to buy it here, and I hope it may be a long time before I go away. I don't know, though; that depends upon whether I can dispose of my things. There is my seal-skin, it cost twenty-five guineas last year, and it ought to be worth something. And my watch—see what a nice one it is. I should like to sell them all, every one. Then I could stay here as long as the money lasted."

"How much do you pay here?" I inquired, for she had taken me so far into counsel that I felt justified in asking that question.

"A pound a week," she answered.

"A pound a week!" I repeated, in amazement. "Does Tardif know that?"

"I don't think he does," she said. "When I had been here a week I gave Mrs. Tardif a sovereign, thinking perhaps she would give me a little out of it. I am not used to being poor, and I did not know how much I ought to pay. But she kept it all, and came to me every week for more. Was it too much to pay?"

"Too much!" I said. "You should have spoken to Tardif about it, my poor child."

"I could not talk to Tardif about his mother," she answered. "Besides, it would not have been too much if I had only had plenty. But it has made me so anxious. I did not know whatever I should do when it was all gone. I do not know now."

Here was a capital opening for a question about her friends.

"You will be compelled to communicate with your family," I said. "You have told me how poor you are; cannot you trust me about your friends?"

"I have no friends," she answered, sorrowfully. "If I had any, do you suppose I should be here?"

"I am one," I said, "and Tardif is another."

"Ah, new friends," she replied; "but I mean real old friends who have known you all your life, like your mother, Dr. Martin, or your cousin Julia. I want somebody to go to who knows all about me, and say to them, after telling them every thing, keeping nothing back at all, 'Have I done right? What else ought I to have done?' No new friend could answer questions like those."

Was there any reason I could bring forward to increase her confidence in me? I thought there was, and her friendlessness and helplessness touched me to the core of my heart. Yet it was with an indefinable reluctance that I brought forward my argument.

"Miss Ollivier," I said, "I have no claim of old acquaintance or friendship, yet it is possible I might answer those questions, if you could prevail upon yourself to tell me the circumstances of your former life. In a few weeks I shall be in a position to show you more friendship than I can do now. I shall have a home of my own, and a wife who will be your friend more fittingly, perhaps, than myself."

"I knew it," she answered, half shyly. "Tardif told me you were going to marry your cousin Julia."

Just then we heard the fold-yard gate swing to behind some one who was coming to the house.

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH.

ONE IN A THOUSAND.

I had altogether forgotten that Captain Carey's yacht was waiting for me off the little bay below; and I sprang quickly to the door in the dread that he had followed me.

It was an immense relief to see only Tardif's tall figure bending under his creel and nets, and crossing the yard slowly. I hailed him and he quickened his pace, his honest features lighting up at the sight of me.

"How do you find mam'zelle, doctor?" were his first eager words.

"All right," I said; "going on famously. Sark is enough to cure any one and any thing of itself, Tardif. There is no air like it. I should not mind being a little ill here myself."

"Captain Carey is impatient to be gone," he continued. "He sent word by me that you might be visiting every house in the island, you had been away so long."

"Not so very long," I said, testily; "but I will just run in and say good-by, and then I want you to walk with me to the cliff."

I turned back for a last look and a last word. No chance of learning her secret now. The picture was as perfect as when I had had the first glimpse of it, only her face had grown, if possible, more charming after my renewed scrutiny of it.

There are faces that grow upon you the longer and the oftener you look upon them; faces that seem to have a veil over them, which melts away like the thin, fine mist of the morning upon the cliffs, until they flash out in their full color and beauty. The last glance was eminently satisfactory, and so was the last word.

"Shall I send you the hair?" asked Miss Ollivier, returning practically to a matter of business.

"To be sure," I answered. "I shall dispose of it to advantage, but I have not time to wait for it now."

"And may I write a letter to you?"

"Yes," was my reply: I was too pleased to express myself more eloquently.

"Good-by," she said; "you are a very good doctor to me."

"And friend?" I added.

"And friend," she repeated.

That was the last word, for I was compelled to hurry away. Tardif accompanied me to the cliff, and I took the opportunity to tell him as pleasantly as I could the extravagant charge his mother had made upon her lodger, and the girl's anxiety about the future. A more grieved look never came across a man's face.

"Dr. Martin," he said, "I would have cut off my hand rather than it had been so. Poor little mam'zelle! Poor old mother! She is growing old, sir, and old people are greedy. The fall of the year is dark and cold, and gives nothing, but takes away all it can, and hoards it for the young new spring that is to follow. It seems almost the nature of old age. Poor old mother! I am very grieved for her. And I am troubled, troubled about mam'zelle. To think she has been fretting all the winter about this, when I was trying to find out how to cheer her! Only five pounds left, poor little soul! Why! all I have is at her service. It is enough to have her only in the house, with her pretty ways and sweet voice. I'll put it all right with mam'zelle, sir, and with my poor old mother too. I am very sorry for her."

"Miss Ollivier has been asking me to sell her hair," I said.

"No, no," he answered hastily, "not a single hair! I cannot say yes to that. The pretty bright curls! If anybody is to buy them, I will. Yes, doctor! that is famous. She wishes you to sell her hair? Very good; I will buy it; it must be mine. I have more money than you think, perhaps. I will buy mam'zelle's pretty curls; and she shall have the money, and then there will be more than five pounds in her little purse. Tell me how much they will be. Ten pounds? Fifteen? Twenty?"

"Nonsense, Tardif!" I answered; "keep one of them, if you like; but I must have the rest. We will settle it between us."

"No, doctor," he said; "your cousin will not like that. You are going to be married soon; it would not do for you to keep mam'zelle's curls."

It was said with so much simplicity and good-heartedness that I felt ashamed of a rising feeling of resentment, and parted with him cordially. In a few minutes afterward I was on board the yacht, and laughing at Captain Carey's reproaches. Tardif was still visible on the edge of the cliff, watching our departure.

"That is as good a fellow as ever breathed," said Captain Carey, waving his cap to him.

"I know it better than you do," I replied.

"And how is the young woman?" he asked.

"Going on as well as a broken arm and a sprained ankle can do," I answered.

"You will want to come again, Martin," he said; "when are we to have another day?"

"Well, I shall hear how she is every now and then," I answered; "it takes too long a time to come more often than is necessary. But you will bring me if it is necessary?"

"With all my heart," said Captain Carey.

For the next few days I waited with some impatience for Miss Ollivier's promised letter. It came at last, and I put it into my pocket to read when I was alone—why, I could scarcely have explained to myself.

"Dear Dr. Martin," it began, "I have no little commission to trouble you with. Tardif tells me it was quite a mistake, his mother taking a sovereign from me each week. She does not understand English money; and he says I have paid quite sufficient to stay with them a whole year longer without paying any more. I am quite content about that now. Tardif says, too, that he has a friend in Southampton who will buy my hair, and give more than anybody in Guernsey. So I need not trouble you about it, though I am sure you would have done it for me.

"I have not put my foot to the ground yet; but yesterday Tardif carried me all the way down to his boat, and took me out for a little sail under the beautiful cliffs, where we could look up and see all those strange carvings upon the rocks. I thought that perhaps there were real things written there that we should like to read. Sometimes in the sky there are fine faint lines across the blue which look like written sentences, if one could only make them out. Here they are on the rocks, but every tide washes them away, leaving fresh ones. Perhaps they are messages to me, answers to those questions that I cannot answer myself.

"Good-by, my good doctor. I am trying to do every thing you told me exactly; and I am getting well again fast. I do not believe I shall be lame; you are too clever for that. Your patient,

"OLIVIA."

Olivia! I looked at the word again to make sure of it. Then it was not her surname that was Ollivier, and I was still ignorant of that. I saw in a moment how the mistake had arisen, and how innocent she was of any deception in the matter. She would tell Tardif that her name was Olivia, and he thought only of the Olliviers he knew. It was a mistake that had been of use in checking curiosity, and I did not feel bound to put it right. My mother and Julia appeared to have forgotten my patient in Sark altogether.

Olivia! I thought it a very pretty name, and repeated it to myself with its abbreviations, Olive, Livy. It was difficult to abbreviate Julia; Ju I had called her in my rudest school-boy days. I wondered how high Olivia would stand beside me; for I had never seen her on her feet. Julia was not two inches shorter than myself; a tall, stiff figure, neither slender enough to be lissome, nor well-proportioned enough to be majestic. But she was very good, and her price was far above rubies.

According to the wise man, it was a difficult task to find a virtuous woman.

It was a quiet time in the afternoon, and in order to verify my recollection of the wise man's saying, which was a little cloudy in my memory, I searched through Julia's Bible for it. I came across a passage which made me pause and consider. "Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one by one, to find out the account: which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not; one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found."

"Tardif is the man," I said to myself, "but is Julia the woman? Have I had better luck than Solomon?"

"What are you reading, Martin?" asked my father, who had just come in, and was painfully fitting on a pair of new and very tight kid gloves. I read the passage aloud, without comment.

"Very good," he remarked, chuckling, "upon my word! I did not know there was any thing as rich as that in the old book! Who says it, Martin? A very wise preacher he was, and knew what he was talking about. Had seen life, eh? It's as true as—as—as the gospel."

I could not help laughing at the comparison he was forced to; yet I felt angry with him and myself.

"What do you say about my mother and Julia, sir?" I asked.

He chuckled again cynically, examining with care a spot on the palm of one of his gloves. "Ha! ha! my son"—I hated to hear him say "my son"—"I will answer you in the words of another wise man: 'Most virtuous women, like hidden treasures, are secure because nobody seeks after them.'"

So saying, he turned out of the room, swinging his gold-headed cane jauntily between his fingers.

I visited Sark again in about ten days, to set Olivia free from my embargo upon her walking. I allowed her to walk a little way along a smooth meadow-path, leaning on my arm; and I found that she was a head lower than myself—a beautiful height for a woman. That time Captain Carey had set me down at the Havre Gosselin, appointing me to meet him at the Creux Harbor, which was exactly on the opposite side of the island. In crossing over to it—a distance of rather more than a mile—I encountered Julia's friends, Emma and Maria Brouard.

"You here again, Martin!" exclaimed Emma.

"Yes," I answered; "Captain Carey set me down at the Havre Gosselin, and is gone round to meet me at the Creux."

"You have been to see that young person?" asked Maria.

"Yes," I replied.

"She is a very singular young woman," she continued; "we think her stupid. We cannot make anything of her. But there is no doubt poor Tardif means to marry her."

"Nonsense!" I ejaculated, hotly; "I beg your pardon, Maria, but I give Tardif credit for sense enough to know his own position."

"So did we," said Emma, "but it looks odd. He married an Englishwoman before. It's old Mère Renouf who says he worships the ground she treads upon. You know he holds a very good position in the island, and he is a great favorite with the seigneur. There are dozens of girls of his own class in Guernsey and Alderney, to say nothing of Sark, who would be only too glad to have him. He is a very handsome man, Martin."

"Tardif is a fine fellow," I admitted.

"I shall be very sorry for him to be taken in again," continued Emma; "nobody knows who that young person may be; it looks odd on the face of it. Are you in a hurry? Well, good-by. Give our best love to dear Julia. We are busy at work on a wedding-present for her; but you must not tell her that, you know."

I went on in a hot rage, shapeless and wordless, but smouldering like a fire within me. The cool, green lane, deep between hedge-rows, the banks of which were gemmed with primroses, had no effect upon me just then. Tardif marry Olivia! That was an absurd, preposterous notion indeed. It required all my knowledge of the influence of dress on the average human mind, to convince myself that Olivia, in her coarse green serge dress, had impressed the people of Sark with the notion that she would be no unsuitable mate for their rough, though good and handsome fisherman.

Was it possible that they thought her stupid? Reserved and silent she might be, as she wished to remain unmolested and concealed; but not stupid! That any one should dream so wildly as to think of Olivia marrying Tardif, was the utmost folly I could imagine.

I had half an hour to wait in the little harbor, its great cliffs rising all about me, with only a tunnel bored through them to form an entrance to the green island within. My rage had partly fumed itself away before the yacht came in sight.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH.

OVERHEAD IN LOVE.

Awfully fast the time sped away. It was the second week in March I passed in Sark; the second week in May came upon me as if borne by a whirlwind. It was only a month to the day so long fixed upon for our marriage. My mother began to fidget about my going over to London to pay my farewell bachelor visit to Jack Senior, and to fit myself out with wedding toggery. Julia's was going on fast to completion. Our trip to Switzerland was distinctly planned out, almost from day to day. Go I must to London; order my wedding-suit I must.

But first there could be no harm in running over to Sark to see Olivia once more. As soon as I was married I would tell Julia all about her. But if either arm or ankle went wrong for want of attention, I should never forgive myself.

"When shall we have another run together, Captain Carey?" I asked.

"Any day you like, my boy," he answered; "your days of liberty are growing few and short now, eh? I've never had a chance of trying it myself, Martin, but they are nervous times, I should think. Cruising in doubtful channels, eh? with uncertain breezes? How does Julia keep up?"

"I can spare to-morrow," I replied, ignoring his remarks; "on Saturday I shall cross over to England to see Jack Senior."

"And bid him adieu?" he said, laughing, "or give him an invitation to your own house? I shall be glad to see you in a house of your own. Your father is too young a man for you."

"Can you take me to Sark to-morrow?" I asked.

"To be sure I can," he answered.

It was the last time I could see Olivia before my marriage. Afterward I should see much of her; for Julia would invite her to our house, and be a friend to her. I spent a wretchedly sleepless night; and whenever I dozed by fits and starts, I saw Olivia before me, weeping bitterly, and refusing to be comforted.

From St. Sampson's we set sail straight for the Havre Gosselin, without a word upon my part; and the wind being in our favor, we were not long in crossing the channel. To my extreme surprise and chagrin, Captain Carey announced his intention of landing with me, and leaving the yacht in charge of his men to await our return.

"The ladder is excessively awkward," I objected, "and some of the rungs are loose. You don't mind running the risk of a plunge into the water?"

"Not in the least," he answered, cheerily; "for the matter of that, I plunge into it every morning at L'Ancresse. I want to see Tardif. He is one in a thousand, as you say; and one cannot see such a man every day of one's life."

There was no help for it, and I gave in, hoping some good luck awaited me. I led the way up the zigzag path, and just as we reached the top I saw the slight, erect figure of Olivia seated upon the brow of a little grassy knoll at a short distance from us. Her back was toward us, so she was not aware of our vicinity; and I pointed toward her with an assumed air of indifference.

"I believe that is my patient yonder," I said; "I will just run across and speak to her, and then follow you to the farm."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "there is a lovely view from that spot. I recollect it well. I will go with you, Martin. There will be time enough to see Tardif."

Did Captain Carey suspect any thing? Or what reason could he have for wishing to see Olivia? Could it be merely that he wanted to see the view from that particular spot? I could not forbid him accompanying me, but I wished him at Jericho.

What is more stupid than to have an elderly man dogging one's footsteps?

I trusted devoutly that we should see or hear Tardif before reaching the knoll; but no such good fortune befell me. Olivia did not hear our footsteps upon the soft turf, though we approached her very nearly. The sun shone upon her glossy hair, every thread of which seemed to shine back again. She was reading aloud, apparently to herself, and the sounds of her sweet voice were wafted by the air toward us. Captain Carey's face became very thoughtful.

A few steps nearer brought us in view of Tardif, who had spread his nets on the grass, and was examining them narrowly for rents. Just at this moment he was down on his knees, not far from Olivia, gathering some broken meshes together, but listening to her, with an expression of huge contentment upon his handsome face. A bitter pang shot through me. Could it be true by any possibility—that lie I had heard the last time I was in Sark?

"Good-day, Tardif," shouted Captain Carey; and both Tardif and Olivia started. But both of their faces grew brighter at seeing us, and both sprang up to give us welcome. Olivia's color had come back to her cheeks, and a sweeter face no man ever looked upon.

"I am very glad you are come once more," she said, putting her hand in mine; "you told me in your last letter you were going to England, and might not come over to Sark before next autumn. How glad I am to see you again!"

I glanced from the corner of my eye at Captain Carey. He looked very grave, but his eyes could not rest upon Olivia without admiring her, as she stood before us, bright-faced, slender, erect, with the heavy folds of her coarse dress falling about her as gracefully as if they were of the richest material.

"This is my friend, Captain Carey, Miss Olivia," I said, "in whose yacht I have come over to visit you."

"I am very glad to see any friend of Dr. Martin's," she answered, as she hold out her hand to him with a smile; "my doctor and I are great friends, Captain Carey."

"So I suppose," he said, significantly—or at least his tone and look seemed fraught with significance to me.

"We were talking of you only a few minutes ago, Dr. Martin," she continued; "I was telling Tardif how you sang the 'Three Fishers' to me the last time you were here, and how it rings in my ears still, especially when he is away fishing. I repeated the three last lines to him:

'For men must work, and women must weep;

And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep.

So good-by to the bar, with its moaning.'"

"I do not like it, doctor," said Tardif: "there's no hope in it. Yet to sleep out yonder at last, on the great plain under the sea, would be no bad thing."

"You must sing it for Tardif," added Olivia, with a pretty imperiousness, "and then he will like it."

My throat felt dry, and my tongue parched. I could not utter a word in reply.

"This would be the very place for such a song," said Captain Carey. "Come, Martin, let us have it."

"No; I can sing nothing to-day," I answered, harshly.

The very sight of her made me feel miserable beyond words; the sound of her voice maddened me. I felt as if I was angry with her almost to hatred for her grace and sweetness; yet I could have knelt down at her feet, and been happy only to lay my hand on a fold of her dress. No feeling had ever stirred me so before, and it made me irritable. Olivia's clear gray eyes looked at me wonderingly.

"Is there anything the matter with you, Dr. Martin?" she inquired.

"No," I replied, turning away from her abruptly. Every one of them felt my rudeness; and there was a dead silence among us for half a minute, which seemed an age to me. Then I heard Captain Carey speaking in his suavest tones.

"Are you quite well again, Miss Ollivier?" he asked.

"Yes, quite well, I think," she said, in a very subdued voice. "I cannot walk far yet, and my arm is still weak: but I think I am quite well. I have given Dr. Martin a great deal of trouble and anxiety."

She spoke in the low, quiet tones of a child who has been chidden unreasonably. I was asking myself what Captain Carey meant by not leaving me alone with my patient. When a medical man makes a call, the intrusion of any unprofessional, indifferent person is unpardonable. If it had been Suzanne, Tardif, or Mother Renouf, who was keeping so close beside us, I could have made no reasonable objection. But Captain Carey!

"Tardif," I said, "Captain Carey came ashore on purpose to visit you and your farm."

I knew he was excessively proud of his farm, which consisted of about four or five acres. He caught at the words with alacrity, and led the way toward his house with tremendous strides. There was no means of evading a tour of inspection, though Captain Carey appeared to follow him reluctantly. Olivia and I were left alone, but she was moving after them slowly, when I ran to her, and offered her my arm on the plea that her ankle was still too weak to bear her weight unsupported.

"Olivia!" I exclaimed, after we had gone a few yards, bringing her and myself to a sudden halt. Then I was struck dumb. I had nothing special to say to her. How was it I had called her so familiarly Olivia?

"Well, Dr. Martin?" she said, looking into my face again with eager, inquiring eyes, as if she was wishful to understand my varying moods if she could.

"What a lovely place this is!" I ejaculated.

More lovely than any words I ever heard could describe. It was a perfect day, and a perfect view. The sea was like an opal, changing every minute with the passing shadows of snow-white clouds which floated lazily across the bright blue of the sky. The cliffs, Sark Cliffs, which have not their equal in the world, stretched below us, with every hue of gold and bronze, and hoary white, and soft gray; and here and there a black rock, with livid shades of purple, and a bloom upon it like a raven's wing. Rocky islets, never trodden by human foot, over which the foam poured ceaselessly, were dotted all about the changeful surface of the water. And just beneath the level of my eyes was Olivia's face—the loveliest thing there, though there was so much beauty lying around us.

"Yes, it is a lovely place," she assented, a mischievous smile playing about her lips.

"Olivia," I said, taking my courage by both hands, "it is only a month now till my wedding-day."

Was I deceiving myself, or did she really grow paler? It was but for a moment if it were so. But how cold the air felt all in an instant! The shock was like that of a first plunge into chilly waters, and I was shivering through every fibre.

"I hope you will be happy," said Olivia, "very happy. It is a great risk to run. Marriage will make you either very happy or very wretched."

"Not at all," I answered, trying to speak gayly; "I do not look forward to any vast amount of rapture. Julia and I will get along very well together, I have no doubt, for we have known one another all our lives. I do not expect to be any happier than other men; and the married people I have known have not exactly dwelt in paradise. Perhaps your experience has been different?"

"Oh, no!" she said, her hand trembling on my arm, and her face very downcast; "but I should have liked you to be very, very happy."

So softly spoken, with such a low, faltering voice! I could not trust myself to speak again. A stern sense of duty toward Julia kept me silent; and we moved on, though very slowly and lingeringly.

"You love her very much?" said the quiet voice at my side, not much louder than the voice of conscience, which was speaking imperiously just then.

"I esteem her more highly than any other woman, except my mother," I said. "I believe she would die sooner than do any thing she considered wrong. I do not deserve her, and she loves me, I am sure, very truly and faithfully."

"Do you think she will like me?" asked Olivia, anxiously.

"No; she must love you," I said, with warmth; "and I, too, can be a more useful friend to you after my marriage than I am now. Perhaps then you will feel free to place perfect confidence in us."

She smiled faintly, without speaking—a smile which said plainly she could keep her own secret closely. It provoked me to do a thing I had had no intention of doing, and which I regretted very much afterward. I opened my pocket-book, and drew out the little slip of paper containing the advertisement.

"Read that," I said.

But I do not think she saw more than the first line, for her face went deadly white, and her eyes turned upon me with a wild, beseeching look—as Tardif described it, the look of a creature hunted and terrified. I thought she would have fallen, and I put my arm round her. She fastened both her hands about mine, and her lips moved, though I could not catch a word she was saying.

"Olivia!" I cried, "Olivia! do you suppose I could do any thing to hurt you? Do not be so frightened! Why, I am your friend truly. I wish to Heaven I had not shown you the thing. Have more faith in me, and more courage."

"But they will find me, and force me away from here," she muttered.

"No," I said; "that advertisement was printed in the Times directly after your flight last October. They have not found you out yet; and the longer you are hidden, the less likely they are to find you. Good Heavens! what a fool I was to show it to you!"

"Never mind," she answered, recovering herself a little, but still clinging to my arm; "I was only frightened for the time. You would not give me up to them if you knew all."

"Give you up to them!" I repeated, bitterly. "Am I a Judas?"

But she could not talk to me any more. She was trembling like an aspen-leaf, and her breath came sobbingly. All I could do was to take her home, blaming myself for my cursed folly.

Captain Carey and Tardif met us at the farm-yard gate, but Olivia could not speak to them; and we passed them in silence, challenged by their inquisitive looks. She could only bid me good-by in a tremulous voice; and I watched her go on into her own little room, and close the door between us. That was the last I should see of her before my marriage.

Tardif walked with us to the top of the cliff, and made me a formal, congratulatory speech before quitting us. When he was gone, Captain Carey stood still until he was quite out of hearing, and then stretched out his hand toward the thatched roof, yellow with stone-crop and lichens.

"This is a serious business, Martin," he said, looking sternly at me; "you are in love with that girl."

"I love her with all my heart and soul!" I cried.

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH.

IN A FIX.

Yes, I loved Olivia with all my heart and soul.

I had not known it myself till that moment; and now I acknowledged it boldly, almost defiantly, with a strange mingling of delight and pain in the confession.

Yet the words startled me as I uttered them. They had involved in them so many unpleasant consequences, so much chagrin and bitterness as their practical result, that I stood aghast—even while my pulses throbbed, and my heart beat high, with the novel rapture of loving any woman as I loved Olivia. If I followed out my avowal to its just issue, I should be a traitor to Julia; and all my life up to the present moment would be lost to me. I had scarcely spoken it before I dropped my head on my hands with a groan.

"Come, come, my poor fellow!" said Captain Carey, who could never see a dog with his tail between his legs without whistling to him and patting him, "we must see what can be done."

It was neither a time nor a place for the indulgence of emotion of any kind. It was impossible for me to remain on the cliffs, bemoaning my unhappy fate. I strode on doggedly down the path, kicking the loose stones into the water as they came in my way. Captain Carey followed, whistling softly to himself, and, of all the tunes in the world, he chose the one to the "Three Fishers," which I had sung to Olivia. He continued doing so after we were aboard the yacht, and I saw the boatmen exchange apprehensive glances.

"We shall have wind enough, without whistling for it, before we reach Guernsey," said one of them, after a while; and Captain Carey relapsed into silence. We scarcely spoke again, except about the shifting of the sails, in our passage across. A pretty stiff breeze was blowing, and we found plenty of occupation.

"I cannot leave you like this, Martin, my boy," said Captain Carey, when we went ashore at St. Sampson's; and he put his arm through mine affectionately.

"You will keep my secret?" I said—my voice a key or two lower than usual.

"Martin," answered the good-hearted, clear-sighted old bachelor, "you must not do Julia the wrong of keeping this secret from her."

"I must," I urged. "Olivia knows nothing of it; nobody guesses it but you. I must conquer it. Things have gone too far with poor Julia, for me to back out of our marriage now. You know that as well as I do. Think of it, Captain Carey!"

"But shall you conquer it?" asked Captain Carey, seriously.

I could not answer yes frankly and freely. It seemed a sheer impossibility for me to root out this new love, which I found in my heart below all the old loves and friendships of my whole life. Mad as I was with myself at the thought of my folly, the folly was so sweet to me, that I would as soon have parted with life itself. Nothing in the least resembling this feeling had been a matter of experience with me before. I had read of it in poetry and novels, and laughed a little at it; but now it had come upon me like a strong man armed. I quailed and flinched before the painful conflict necessary to cast out the precious guest.

"Martin," urged Captain Carey, "come up to Johanna, and tell her all about it."

Johanna Carey was one of the powers in the island. Everybody knew her; and everybody went to her for comfort and counsel. She was, of course, related to us all; and knew the exact degree of relationship among us, having the genealogy of each family at her fingers' ends. But, besides these family histories, which were common property, she was also intrusted with the inmost secrets of every household—those secrets which were the most carefully and jealously guarded. I had always been a favorite with her, and nothing could be more natural than this proposal of her brother's, that I should go and tell her all my dilemma.

The house stood on the border of L'Ancresse Common, with no view of the sea, but with the soft, undulating brows and hollows of the common lying before it, and a broken battlement of rocks rising beyond them.

There was always a low, solemn murmur of the invisible sea, singing like a lullaby about the peaceful dwelling, and hushing it into a more profound quiet than even utter silence; for utter silence is irksome and fretting to the ear, which needs some slight reverberation to keep the brain behind it still. A perfume of violets, and the more dainty scent of primroses, pervaded the garden. It seemed incredible that any man should be allowed to live in such a spot; but then Captain Carey was almost as gentle and fastidious as a woman.

Johanna was not unlike her home. There was a repose about her similar to the calm of a judge, which gave additional weight to her counsels. The moment we entered through the gates, a certainty of comfort and help appeared to be wafted upon the pure breeze, floating across the common from the sea.

Johanna was standing at one of the windows in a Quakerish dress of some gray stuff, and with a plain white cap over her white hair. She came down to the door as soon as she saw me, and received me with a motherly kiss, which I returned with more than usual warmth, as one does in any new kind of trouble. I think she was instantly aware that something was amiss with me.

"Is dinner ready, Johanna?" asked her brother; "we are as hungry as hunters."

That was not true as far as I was concerned. For the first time within my recollection my appetite quite failed me, and I merely played with my knife and fork.

Captain Carey regarded me pitifully, and said, "Come, come, Martin, my boy!" several times.

Johanna made no remark; but her quiet, searching eyes looked me through and through, till I almost longed for the time when she would begin to question and cross-question me. After she was gone, Captain Carey gave me two or three glasses of his choicest wine, to cheer me up, as he said; but we were not long before we followed his sister.

"Johanna," said Captain Carey, "we have something to tell you."

"Come and sit here by me," she said, making room for me beside her on her sofa; for long experience had taught her how much more difficult it is to make a confession face to face with one's confessor, under the fire of his eyes, as it were, than when one is partially concealed from him.

"Well," she said, in her calm, inviting voice.

"Johanna," I replied, "I am in a terrible fix!"

"Awful!" cried Captain Carey, sympathetically; but a glance from his sister put him to silence.

"What is it, my dear Martin?" asked her inviting voice again.

"I will tell you frankly," I said, feeling I must have it out at once, like an aching tooth. "I love, with all my heart and soul, that girl in Sark; the one who has been my patient there."

"Martin!" she cried, in a tone full of surprise and agitation—"Martin!"

"Yes; I know all you would urge—my honor; my affection for Julia; the claims she has upon me, the strongest claims possible; how good and worthy she is; what an impossibility it is even to look back now. I know it all, and feel how miserably binding it is upon me. Yet I love Olivia; and I shall never love Julia."

"Martin!" she cried again.

"Listen to me, Johanna," I said, for now the ice was broken, my frozen words were flowing as rapidly as a runnel of water; "I used to dream of a feeling something like this years ago, but no girl I saw could kindle it into reality. I have always esteemed Julia, and when my youth was over, and I had never felt any devouring passion, I began to think love was more of a word than a fact, or to believe that it had become only a word in these cold late times. At any rate, I concluded I was past the age for falling in love. There was my cousin Julia certainly dearer to me than any other woman, except my mother. I knew all her little ways; and they were not annoying to me, or were so in a very small degree. Besides, my father had had a grand passion for my mother, and what had that come to? There would be no such white ashes of a spent fire for Julia to shiver over. That was how I argued the matter out with myself. At eight-and-twenty I had never lost a quarter of an hour's sleep, or missed a meal, for the sake of any girl. Surely I was safe. It was quite fair for me to propose to Julia, and she would be satisfied with the affection I could offer her. Then there was my mother; it was the greatest happiness I could give her, and her life has not been a happy one, God knows. So I proposed to Julia, and she accepted me last Christmas."

"And you are to be married next month?" said Johanna, in an exceedingly troubled tone.

"Yes," I answered, "and now every word Julia speaks, and every thing she does, grates upon me. I love her as much as ever as my cousin, but as my wife! Good Heavens! Johanna, I cannot tell you how I dread it."

"What can be done?" she exclaimed, looking from me to Captain Carey, whose face was as full of dismay as her own. But he only shook his head despondingly.

"Done!" I repeated, "nothing, absolutely nothing. It is utterly impossible to draw back. Our house is nearly ready for us, and even Julia's wedding-dress and veil are bought."

"There is not a house you enter," said Johanna, solemnly, "where they are not preparing a wedding-present for Julia and you. There has not been a marriage in your district, among ourselves, for nine years. It is as public as a royal marriage."

"It must go on," I answered, with the calmness of despair. "I am the most good-for-nothing scoundrel in Guernsey to fall in love with my patient. You need not tell me so, Johanna. And yet, if I could think that Olivia loved me, I would not change with the happiest man alive."

"What is her name?" asked Johanna.

"One of the Olliviers," answered Captain Carey; "but what Olliviers she belongs to, I don't know. She is one of the prettiest creatures I ever saw."

"An Ollivier!" exclaimed Johanna, in her severest accents. "Martin, what are you thinking of?"

"Her Christian name is Olivia," I said, hastily; "she does not belong to the Olliviers at all. It was Tardif's mistake, and very natural. She was born in Australia, I believe."

"Of a good family, I hope?" asked Johanna. "There are some persons it would be a disgrace to you to love. What is her other name?"

"I don't know," I answered, reluctantly but distinctly.

Johanna turned her face full upon me now—a face more agitated than I had ever seen it. There was no use in trying to keep back any part of my serious delinquency, so I resolved to make a clean breast of it.

"I know very little about her," I said—"that is, about her history; as for herself, she is the sweetest, dearest, loveliest girl in the whole world to me. If I were free, and she loved me, I should not know what else to wish for. All I know is, that she has run away from her people; why, I have no more idea than you have, or who they are, or where they live; and she has been living in Tardif's cottage since last October. It is an infatuation, do you say? So it is, I dare say. It is an infatuation; and I don't know that I shall ever shake it off."

"What is she like?" asked Johanna. "Is she very merry and bright?"

"I never saw her laugh," I said.

"Very melancholy and sad, then?"

"I never saw her weep," I said.

"What is it then, Martin?" she asked, earnestly.

"I cannot tell what it is," I answered. "Everything she does and says has a charm for me that I could never describe. With her for my wife I should be more happy than I ever was; with any one else I shall be wretched. That is all I know."

I had left my seat by Johanna, and was pacing to and fro in the room, too restless and miserable to keep still. The low moan of the sea sighed all about the house. I could have cast myself on the floor had I been alone, and wept and sobbed like a woman. I could see no loop-hole of escape from the mesh of circumstances which caught me in their net.

A long, dreary, colorless, wretched life stretched before me, with Julia my inseparable companion, and Olivia altogether lost to me. Captain Carey and Johanna, neither of whom had tasted the sweets and bitters of marriage, looked sorrowfully at me and shook their heads.

"You must tell Julia," said Johanna, after a long pause.

"Tell Julia!" I echoed. "I would not tell her for worlds!"

"You must tell her," she repeated; "it is your clear duty. I know it will be most painful to you both, but you have no right to marry her with this secret on your mind."

"I should be true to her," I interrupted, somewhat angrily.

"What do you call being true, Martin Dobrée?" she asked, more calmly than she had spoken before. "Is it being true to a woman to let her believe you choose and love her above all other women when that is absolutely false? No; you are too honorable for that. I tell you it is your plain duty to let Julia know this, and know it at once."

"It will break her heart," I said, with a sharp twinge of conscience and a cowardly shrinking from the unpleasant duty urged upon me.

"It will not break Julia's heart," said Johanna, very sadly; "it may break your mother's."

I reeled as if a sharp blow had struck me. I had been thinking far less of my mother than of Julia; but I saw, as with a flash of lightning, what a complete uprooting of all her old habits and long-cherished hopes this would prove to my mother, whose heart was so set upon this marriage. Would Julia marry me if she once heard of my unfortunate love for Olivia? And, if not, what would become of our home? My mother would have to give up one of us, for it was not to be supposed she would consent to live under the same roof with me, now the happy tie of cousinship was broken, and none dearer to be formed.

Which could my mother part with best? Julia was almost as much her daughter as I was her son; yet me she pined after if ever I was absent long. No; I could not resolve to run the risk of breaking that gentle, faithful heart, which loved me so fully. I went back to Johanna, and took her hand in both of mine.

"Keep my secret," I said, earnestly, "you two. I will make Julia and my mother happy. Do not mistrust me. This infatuation overpowered me unawares. I will conquer it; at the worst I can conceal it. I promise you Julia shall never regret being my wife."

"Martin," answered Johanna, determinedly, "if you do not tell Julia I must tell her myself. You say you love this other girl with all your heart and soul."

"Yes, and that is true," I said.

"Then Julia must know before she marries you."

Nothing could move Johanna from that position, and in my heart I recognized its righteousness. She argued with me that it was Julia's due to hear it from myself. I knew afterward that she believed the sight of her distress and firm love for myself would dissipate the infatuation of my love for Olivia. But she did not read Julia's character as well as my mother did.

Before she let me leave her I had promised to have my confession and subsequent explanation with Julia all over the following day; and to make this the more inevitable, she told me she should drive into St. Peter-Port the next afternoon about five o'clock, when she should expect to find this troublesome matter settled, either by a renewal of my affection for my betrothed, or the suspension of the betrothal. In the latter case she promised to carry Julia home with her until the first bitterness was over.

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH.

A MIDNIGHT RIDE.

I took care not to reach home before the hour when Julia usually went to bed. She had been out in the country all day, visiting the south cliffs of our island, with some acquaintances from England who were staying for a few days in St. Peter-Port. In all probability she would be too tired to sit up till my return if I were late.

I had calculated aright. It was after eleven o'clock when I entered, and my mother only was waiting for me. I wished to avoid any confidential chat that evening, and, after answering briefly her fond inquiries as to what could have kept me out so late, I took myself off to my own room.

But it was quite vain to think of sleep that night. I had soon worked myself up into that state of nervous, restless agitation; when one cannot remain quietly in one; room. I attempted to conquer it, but I could not.

The moon, which was at the full, was shining out of a cloudless field of sky upon my window. I longed for fresh air, and freedom, and motion; for a distance between myself and my dear old home—that home which I was about to plunge into troubled waters. The peacefulness oppressed me.

About one o'clock I opened my door as softly as possible, and stole silently downstairs—but not so silently that my mother's quick ear did not catch the slight jarring of my door.

The night-bell hung in my room, and occasionally I was summoned away at hours like this to visit a patient. She called to me as I crept down the stairs.

"Martin, what is the matter?" she whispered, over the banisters.

"Nothing, mother; nothing much," I answered. "I shall be home again in an hour or two. Go to bed, and go to sleep. Whatever makes you so thin-eared?"

"Are you going to take Madam?" she asked, seeing my whip in my hand. "Shall I ring up Pellet?"

"No, no!" I said; "I can manage well enough. Good-night again, my darling old mother."

Her pale, worn face smiled down upon me very tenderly as she kissed her hand to me. I stood, as if spellbound, watching her, and she watching me, until we both laughed, though somewhat falteringly.

"How romantic you are, my boy!" she said, in a tremulous voice.

"I shall not stir till you go back to bed," I answered, peremptorily; and as just then we heard my father calling out fretfully to ask why the door was open, and what was going on in the house, she disappeared, and I went on my way to the stables.

Madam was my favorite mare, first-rate at a gallop when she was in good temper, but apt to turn vicious now and then. She was in good temper to-night, and pricked up her ears and whinnied when I unlocked the stable-door. In a few minutes we were going up the Grange Road at a moderate pace till we reached the open country, and the long, white, dusty roads stretched before us, glimmering in the moonlight. I turned for St. Martin's, and Madam, at the first touch of my whip on her flanks, started off at a long and steady gallop.

It was a cool, quiet night in May. A few of the larger fixed stars twinkled palely in the sky, but the smaller ones were drowned in the full moonlight. The largest of them shone solemnly and brightly in afield of golden green just above the spot where the sun had set hours before. The trees, standing out with a blackness and distinctness never seen by day, appeared to watch for me and look after me as I rode along, forming an avenue of silent but very stately spectators; and to my fancy, for my fancy was highly excited that night, the rustling of the young leaves upon them whispered the name of Olivia. The hoof-beats of my mare's feet upon the hard roads echoed the name Olivia, Olivia!

By-and-by I turned off the road to got nearer the sea, and rode along sandy lanes with banks of turf instead of hedge-rows, which were covered thickly with pale primroses, shining with the same hue as the moon above them. As I passed the scattered cottages, here and there a dog yapped a shrill, snarling hark, and woke the birds, till they gave a sleepy twitter in their new nests.

Now and then I came in full sight of the sea, glittering in the silvery light. I crossed the head of a gorge, and stopped for a while to gaze down it, till my flesh crept. It was not more than a few yards in breadth, but it was of unknown depth, and the rocks stood above it with a thick, heavy blackness. The tide was rushing into its narrow channel with a thunder which throbbed like a pulse; yet in the intervals of its pulsation I could catch the thin, prattling tinkle of a brook running merrily down the gorge to plunge headlong into the sea. Round every spar of the crags, and over every islet of rock, the foam played ceaselessly, breaking over them like drifts of snow, forever melting, and forever forming again.

I kept on my way, as near the sea as I I could, past the sleeping cottages and hamlets, round through St. Pierre du Bois and Torteval, with the gleaming light-houses out on the Hanways, and by Rocquaine Bay, and Vazon Bay, and through the vale to Captain Carey's peaceful house, where, perhaps, to-morrow night—nay, this day's night—Julia might be weeping and wailing broken-hearted.

I had made the circuit of our island—a place so dear to me that it seemed scarcely possible to live elsewhere; yet I should be forced to live elsewhere. I knew that with a clear distinctness. There could be no home for me in Guernsey when my conduct toward Julia should become known.

But now Sark, which had been behind me all my ride, lay full in sight, and the eastern sky behind it began to quicken with new light. The gulls were rousing themselves, and flying out to sea, with their plaintive cries; and the larks were singing their first sleepy notes to the coming day.

As the sun rose, Sark looked very near, and the sea, a plain of silvery blue, seemed solid and firm enough to afford me a road across to it. A white mist lay like a huge snow-drift in hazy, broad curves over the Havre Gosselin, with sharp peaks of cliffs piercing through.

Olivia was sleeping yonder behind that veil of shining mist; and, dear as Guernsey was to me, she was a hundredfold dearer.

But my night's ride bad not made my day's task any easier for me. No new light had dawned upon my difficulty. There was no loop-hole for me to escape from the most painful and perplexing strait I had ever been in. How was I to break it to Julia? and when? It was quite plain to me that the sooner it was over the better it would be for myself, and perhaps the better for her. How was I to go through my morning's calls, in the state of nervous anxiety I found myself in?

I resolved to have it over as soon as breakfast was finished, and my father had gone to make his professional toilet, a lengthy and important duty with him. Yet when breakfast came I was listening intently for some summons, which would give me an hour's grace from fulfilling my own determination. I prolonged my meal, keeping my mother in her place at the table; for she had never given up her office of pouring out my tea and coffee.

I finished at List, and still no urgent message had come for me. My mother left us together alone, as her custom was, for what time I had to spare—a variable quantity always with me.

Now was the dreaded moment. But how was I to begin? Julia was so calm and unsuspecting. In what words could I convey my fatal meaning most gently to her? My head throbbed, and I could not raise my eyes to her face. Yet it must be done.

"Dear Julia," I said, in as firm a voice as I could command.

"Yes, Martin."

But just then Grace, the housemaid, knocked emphatically at the door, and after a due pause entered with a smiling, significant face, yet with an apologetic courtesy.

"If you please, Dr. Martin," she said, "I'm very sorry, but Mrs. Lihou's baby is taken with convulsion-fits; and they want you to go as fast as ever you can, please, sir."

"Was I sorry or glad? I could not tell. It was a reprieve; but then I knew positively it was nothing more than a reprieve. The sentence must be executed. Julia came to me, bent her cheek toward me, and I kissed it. That was our usual salutation when our morning's interview was ended.

"I am going down to the new house," she said. "I lost a good deal of time yesterday, and I must make up for it to-day. Shall you be passing by at any time, Martin?"

"Yes—no—I cannot tell exactly," I stammered.

"If you are passing, come in for a few minutes," she answered; "I have a thousand things to speak to you about."

"Shall you come in to lunch?" I asked.

"No, I shall take something with me," she replied; "it hinders so; coming back here."

I was not overworked that morning. The convulsions of Mrs. Lihou's baby were not at all serious; and, as I have before stated, the practice which my father and I shared between us was a very limited one. My part of it naturally fell among our poorer patients, who did not expect me to waste their time and my own, by making numerous or prolonged visits. So I had plenty of time to call upon Julia at the new house; but I could not summon sufficient courage. The morning slipped away while I was loitering about Fort George, and chatting carelessly with the officers quartered there.

I went to lunch, pretty sure of finding no one but my mother at home. There was no fear of losing her love, if every other friend turned me the cold shoulder, as I was morally certain they would, with no blame to themselves. But the very depth and constancy of her affection made it the more difficult and the more terrible for me to wound her. She had endured so much, poor mother! and was looking so wan and pale. If it had not been for Johanna's threat, I should have resolved to say nothing about Olivia, and to run my chance of matrimonial happiness.

What a cruel turn Fate had done me when it sent me across the sea to Sark ten weeks ago!

My mother was full of melancholy merriment that morning, making pathetic little jokes about Julia and me, and laughing at them heartily herself—short bursts of laughter which left her paler than she had been before.

I tried to laugh myself, in order to encourage her brief playfulness, though the effort almost choked me. Before I went out again, I sat beside her for a few minutes, with my head, which ached awfully by this time, resting on her dear shoulder.

"Mother," I said, "you are very fond of Julia?"

"I love her just the same as if she were my daughter, Martin—as she will be soon," she answered.

"Do you love her as much as me?" I asked.

"Jealous boy!" she said, laying her hand on my hot forehead, "no, not half as much; not a quarter, not a tenth part as much! Does that content you?"

"Suppose something should prevent our marriage?" I suggested.

"But nothing can," she interrupted; "and, O Martin! I am sure you will be very happy with Julia."

I said no more, for I did not dare to tell her yet; but I wished I had spoken to her about Olivia, instead of hiding her name, and all belonging to her, in my inmost heart. My mother would know all quite soon enough, unless Julia and I agreed to keep it secret, and let things go on as they were.

If Julia said she would marry me, knowing that I was heart and soul in love with another woman, why, then I would go through with it, and my mother need never hear a word about my dilemma.

Julia must decide my lot. My honor was pledged to her; and if she insisted upon the fulfilment of my engagement to her, well, of course, I would fulfil it.

I went down reluctantly at length to the new house; but it was at almost the last hour. The church-clocks had already struck four; and I knew Johanna would be true to her time, and drive up the Grange at five. I left a message with my mother for her, telling her where she would find Julia and me. Then doggedly, but sick at heart with myself and all the world, I went down to meet my doom.

It was getting into nice order, this new house of ours. We had had six months to prepare it in, and to fit it up exactly to our minds; and it was as near my ideal of a pleasant home as our conflicting tastes permitted. Perhaps this was the last time I should cross its threshold. There was a pang in the thought.

This was my position. If Julia listened to my avowal angrily, and renounced me indignantly, passionately, I lost fortune, position, profession; my home and friends, with the sole exception of my mother. I should be regarded alternately as a dupe and a scoundrel. Guernsey would become too hot to hold me, and I should be forced to follow my luck in some foreign land. If, on the other hand, Julia clung to me, and would not give me up, trusting to time to change my feelings, then I lost Olivia; and to lose her seemed the worse fate of the two.

Julia was sitting alone in the drawing-room, which overlooked the harbor and the group of islands across the channel. There was no fear of interruption; no callers to ring the bell and break in upon our tête-à-tête. It was an understood thing that at present only Julia's most intimate friends had been admitted into our new house, and then by special invitation alone.

There was a very happy, very placid expression on her face. Every harsh line seemed softened, and a pleased smile played about her lips. Her dress was one of those simple, fresh, clean muslin gowns, with knots of ribbon about it, which make a plain woman almost pretty, and a pretty woman bewitching. Her dark hair looked less prim and neat than usual. She pretended not to hear me open the door; but as I stood still at the threshold gazing at her, she lifted up her head, with a very pleasant smile.

"I am very glad you are come, my dear Martin," she said, softly.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH.

A LONG HALF-HOUR.

I dared not dally another moment. I must take my plunge at once into the icy-cold waters.

"I have something of importance to say to you, dear cousin," I began.

"So have I," she said, gayly; "a thousand things, as I told you this morning, sir, though you are so late in coming to hear them. See, I have been making a list of a few commissions for you to do in London. They are such as I can trust to you; but for plate, and glass, and china, I think we had better wait till we return from Switzerland. We are sure to come home through London."

Her eyes ran over a paper she was holding in her hand; while I stood opposite to her, not knowing what to do with myself, and feeling the guiltiest wretch alive.

"Cannot you find a seat?" she asked, after a short silence.

I sat down on the broad window-sill instead of on the chair close to hers. She looked up at that, and fixed her eyes upon me keenly. I had often quailed before Julia's gaze as a boy, but never as I did now.

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

A NOVEL

BY HESBA STRETTON

CONTENTS

PART THE FIRST.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.

PART THE SECOND.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.

CHAPTER THE NINTH.

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH.

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH.

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH.

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH.