And so it was all over.

"All over," he said to himself—"over and done with, Philip. Steady on, Philip; take it fighting!"

But they were only words—as yet he could not "take it fighting." Nor was the knowledge that he was never to hold her quite all the grief that lay upon him as he made his way along the ill-lit streets. There was, besides, a very cruel smart—the abstract pain of being such a little to one who was so much to him.

He visited the patients who were still awake, and dressed such wounds as needed to be dressed. He heard the little peevish questions and the dull complaints just as he had done the night before. The nurse walked softly past the sleepers with her shaded lamp, and once or twice he spoke to her. And when, the doctor\'s duties done, the man had gained his room, he thought of his hopes the night before, and sat with elbows on the table while the hours struck, remembering what had happened since.

The necessity for returning to the house so speedily, to see his mother, was eminently distasteful; he longed to escape it. And then suddenly he warmed towards her in self-reproach, thinking it had been very hard of him to wish to neglect his mother in order to spare awkwardness to another woman. His repugnance to the task was deep-rooted, all the same, and it did not lessen as the afternoon approached. But for the fact of yesterday\'s indisposition, he could never have brought himself to overcome it.

The embarrassment that he had feared, however, was averted by Miss Brettan\'s absence.

Mrs. Kincaid said that she was quite well again to-day; Mary had told her of his call the previous evening; how long was it he had stopped?

"Oh, not very long," he said; "has the neuralgia quite gone?"

"I feel a little weary after it, that\'s all. Is there anything fresh, Philip?"

"Fresh?" he answered vaguely. "No, dear. I don\'t know that there\'s anything very fresh."

"You look tired yourself," she said; "I thought that perhaps you were troubled?"

She thought, too, that Miss Brettan had looked troubled, and instinct pointed to something having occurred. A conviction that her son was getting fond of her companion had been unspoken in her mind for some time, and under her placid questions now rankled a little wistfulness, in feeling that she was not held dear enough for confidence. She wanted to say to him outright: "Philip, did you tell Miss Brettan you were fond of her when I was upstairs last night?" but was reluctant to seem inquisitive. He, with never an inkling that she could suspect his love, meanwhile reflected that for Mary\'s continued peace it was desirable that his mother should never conjecture he had been refused.

It is doubtful whether he had ever felt so wholly tender towards her as he did in these moments while he admitted that it was imperative to keep the secret from her; and perhaps the mother\'s heart had never turned so far aside from him as while she perceived that she was never to be told.

They exchanged commonplaces with the one grave subject throbbing in the minds of both. Of the two, the woman was the more laboured; and presently he noticed what uphill work it was, and sighed. She heard the sigh, and could have echoed it, thinking sadly that the presence of her companion was required now to make her society endurable to him. But she would not refer to Mary. She bent over her wool-work, and the needle went in and out with feeble regularity, while she maintained a wounded silence, which the man was regarding as an unwillingness to talk.

He said at last that he must go, and she did not offer to detain him.

"I want to hurry back this afternoon; you won\'t mind?"

"No," she murmured; "you know what you have to do, Philip, better than I."

He stooped and kissed her. For the first time in her life she did not return his kiss. She gave him her cheek, and rested one hand a little tremulously on his shoulder.

"Good-bye," she said; her tone was so gentle that he did not remark the absence of the caress. "Don\'t go working too hard, Phil!"

He patted the hand reassuringly, and let himself out. Then the hand crept slowly up to her eyes, and she wiped some tears away. The wool-work drooped to her lap, and she sat recalling a little boy who had been used to talk of the wondrous things he was going to do for "mother" when he became a man, and who now had become a man, living for a strange woman, and full of a love which "mother" might only guess.

She could not feel quite so cordial to Mary as she had done. To think of her holding her son\'s confidence, while she herself was left to speculate, made the need for surmises seem harder. And Philip was unhappy: her companion must be indifferent to him; nothing but that could account for the unhappiness, or for the reservation. She could have forgiven her engrossing his affections—in time; but her indifference was more than she could forgive.

Still, this was the woman he loved—and she endeavoured to hide her resentment, as she had hidden her suspicions. Their intercourse during the next week was less free than usual, nevertheless. Perhaps the resentment was less easy to hide, or perhaps Mary\'s nervousness made her unduly sensitive, but there were pauses which seemed to her significant of condemnation. She was exceedingly uncomfortable during this week. Sometimes she was only deterred from proclaiming what had happened and appealing to the other\'s fairness to exonerate her, by the recollection that it was, after all, just possible that the avowal might have the effect of transforming a bush into an officer.

She could not venture to repeat the retirement to her room the next time the doctor came. Nearly a fortnight had gone by. And she forced herself to turn to him with a few remarks. He was not the man to disguise his feelings successfully by a flow of small-talk; his life had not qualified him for it; and it was an ordeal to him to sit there in the presence of Mary and witness attempts in which he perceived himself unqualified to co-operate. His knowledge that the simulated ease should have originated with himself rather than with her made his ineptitude seem additionally ungracious, and he feared she must think him boorish, and disposed to parade his disappointment for the purpose of exciting her compassion.

Strongly, therefore, as he had wished to avoid a break in the social routine, his subsequent visits were made at longer intervals, and more often than not curtailed on the plea of work. It was, as yet at all events, impossible for him to behave towards her as if nothing untoward had happened, and to shun the house awhile looked to him a wiser course than to haunt it with discomposure patent. Thus the restraint that Mrs. Kincaid was imposing on herself had a further burden to bear: Miss Brettan was keeping her son from her side. The pauses became more frequent, and, to Mary, more than ever ominous. Indeed, while the mother mused mournfully on the consequences of her engagement, the companion herself was questioning how long she could expect to retain it. She began to consider whether she should relinquish it, to elude the indignity of a dismissal. And even if Mrs. Kincaid did fail to suspect the reason for her son\'s absenting himself, the responsibility was the same, she reflected. It was she who divided the pair, she who was accountable for the hurt expression that the old lady\'s face so often wore now. She felt wearily that women had a great deal to endure in life, what with the men they cared for, and the men for whom they did not care. There seemed no privileges pertaining to their sex; being feminine only amplified the scope for vexation. A fact which she did not see was that one of the most pathetic things in connection with the unloved lover is the irritability with which the woman so often thinks about him.

With what sentiments she might have listened to Kincaid had she met him prior to her intimacy with Carew one may only conjecture. Now he touched her not at all; but the intimacy had been an experience which engulfed so much of her sensibility, that she had emerged from it a different being. Kincaid\'s rival, in truth, was the most powerful one that can ever oppose a lover; the rival of constant remembrance—always a doughty antagonist, and never so impregnable as when the woman is instinctively a virtuous woman and has fallen for the man that she remembers.

It occurred to Mary to seek an opportunity for letting the doctor know that he was paining his mother by so rarely coming now; but such an opportunity was not easy to gain, for when he did come his mother of course was present. She thought of writing, but by word of mouth a hint would suffice, while a letter, in the circumstances, would have its awkwardness.

More than two months had gone by when Mrs. Kincaid made her plaint. It was on a Sunday morning. Mary was standing before the window, looking out, while the elder woman sat moodily in her accustomed seat.—

"Are we going to church?" asked Mary.

"Yes, I suppose so; there\'s plenty of time, isn\'t there?"

"Oh, yes, it\'s early yet—not ten. What a lovely day! The spring has begun."

"Yes," assented the other absently.

There was a short silence, and then:

"I shan\'t run any risk of missing Dr. Kincaid by going out; I needn\'t be afraid of that!" she added.

Her voice had in it so much more of pathos than of testiness, that after the instant\'s dismay her companion felt acutely sorry for her.

"A doctor\'s time is scarcely his own, is it?" she murmured, turning.

Mrs. Kincaid did not reply immediately, and the delay seemed to Mary to accentuate the feebleness of her answer.

"I mean," she said, "that it isn\'t as if he were able to leave the hospital whenever he liked. There may be cases——"

"He used to be able to come often; why shouldn\'t he be able now?"

"Yes——" faltered Mary.

"I haven\'t asked him; it is a good reason that keeps him from me, of course. But it\'s hard, when you\'re living in the same town as your son, not to have him with you more than an hour in a month. I don\'t see much more of him than that, lately. The last time he came, he stayed twenty minutes. The time before, he said he was in a hurry before he said, \'How do you do?\' He never put his hat down—you may have; noticed it?"

"Yes, I noticed it," Mary admitted.

"You know; oh, you do know!" she cried inwardly, with a sinking of the heart. "Now, what am I to do?"

"Don\'t imagine I am blaming him," went on Mrs. Kincaid, "I am not blaming anybody; the reason may be very strong indeed. Only it seems rather unfair that I should have to suffer for it, considering that I don\'t hear what it is."

"Then why not speak to Dr. Kincaid? If he understood that you felt his absence so keenly, you may be sure he\'d try to come oftener. Why don\'t you tell him that you miss him?"

"I shall never sue to my son for his visits," said the old lady with a touch of dignity, "nor shall I ask him why he stays away. That is quite his own affair. At my age we begin to see that our children have rights we mustn\'t intrude into—secrets that must be told to us freely, or not told at all. We begin to see it, only we are old to learn. There, my dear, don\'t let us talk about it; it\'s not a pleasant subject. I think we had better go and dress."

Mary looked at her helplessly; there was a finality in her tone which precluded the possibility of any advance. It was more than ever manifest that the task of remonstrating with him devolved upon Mary herself, and she decided to write to him that afternoon. Shortly after dinner Mrs. Kincaid went into the garden, and, left to her own devices in the parlour, Mary drew her chair to the escritoire. She would write a few lines, she thought, however clumsy, and send them at once. Still, they were not easy lines to produce, and she nibbled her pen a good deal in the course of their composition; the self-consciousness that invaded some of the sentences was too glaring. When the note was finished at last, she slipped it into her pocket, and told Mrs. Kincaid she would like to go for a walk.

"Oh, by all means; why not?"

"I thought perhaps you might want me."

"No," said Mrs. Kincaid; "I shall get along very well—I\'m gardening."

She was, indeed, more cheerful than she had been for some time, busying herself among the violets, and stooping over the crocuses to clear the soil away.

"Go along," she added, nodding across her shoulder; "a walk will do you good!"

Though the wish had been expressed only to avoid giving the letter to a servant, Mary thought that she might as well profit by the chance; and from the post-office she sauntered as far as the beach. Then it struck her that the doctor might pay his overdue visit this afternoon, and she was sorry that she had gone out. The laboured letter might have been dispensed with—she might have had a word with him before he joined his mother in the garden! She turned back at once—and as she neared the Lodge, she saw him leaving it. They met not fifty yards from the door.

"Well, have you enjoyed your walk—you haven\'t been very far?" he said.

"Not very," said she; "I changed my mind. How did you find your mother?"

"She had been pottering about on the wet ground, which wasn\'t any too wise of her. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, I ... She has been missing you a little, I think; she wants you there more often."

"Oh?" he said; "I\'m very sorry. Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure; it is more than a little she misses you. As a matter of fact, I have just written to you, Dr. Kincaid."

"To me? What—about this?"

"Yes."

"I didn\'t know," he said; "I never supposed she\'d miss me like that. It was very kind of you."

"I wanted to speak to you about it before. I have seen for some time she was distressed."

"Has she sai............