DR. IZARD had of late presented a more cheerful appearance. His step was lighter and his face less generally downcast. He even was seen to smile one morning at the antics of some children, an unprecedented thing in his history, one would think, from the astonishment it caused among the gossips.

He had been called away several times during the month and the card with the word “absent” on it was very often to be seen hanging beside his door. People grew tired of this, though they knew it meant fame and money to the doctor, and the newly-fledged physician from Boston, whose office was at the other end of the town, prospered in consequence. But Dr. Izard only seemed relieved at this and came and went, as I have said, with a less gloomy if not positively brightened countenance.

He had always kept for himself one solitary place of resort in the village. Without this refuge life would often have been insupportable to him. It was—strange to say, for the Izards had always been aristocratic—the humble house of the village shoemaker, a simple but highly respected man who with his aged wife had been, from sheer worth of character, a decided factor in town for the last twenty-five years.

The little house in which he lived and plied his useful trade stood on the hill-side a few yards above the Fisher cottage, and it was in his frequent visits to this spot that Dr. Izard had seen so much of Polly. The window in which he usually sat overlooked the Fisher garden, and as his visits had extended over years he had ample opportunity for observing her growing beauty from the time she was a curly-headed imp of four to the day she faced the world a gay-hearted damsel of eighteen.

It had been a matter of some mystery in the past why Dr. Izard, with his trained mind and refined tastes, affected this humble home and sought with such assiduity the companionship of this worthy but by no means cultured couple. But this, together with other old wonders, had long lost its hold upon public attention, no one thinking of inquiring any longer into the cause of a habit that had become so fixed it was regarded as part of the village’s history. One effect, however, remained. No one thought of entering the shoemaker’s shop while Dr. Izard sat there. It would have been thought an intrusion by both guest and host.

Mr. and Mrs. Fanning, who had themselves long ceased to wonder at his preference for their society, invariably stopped their work when he entered and greeted him with the same words of welcome they had used fourteen years before when he had unexpectedly taken a seat in the shop without having been summoned for professional purposes. After which necessary ceremony they turned again to their several labors and the doctor sat down in his especial seat, which, as I have said, was in one of the windows, and lapsed into the silence he invariably maintained for half his stay. The time chosen for his visit was usually at nightfall, and whether it was that the charms of nature were unusually attractive to him at that hour, or whether something or somebody in the adjoining gardens secretly interested him, he invariably turned his eyes outward, with an expression that touched the heart of the old lady who watched him and caused many a glance of secret intelligence to pass between her and her equally concerned husband.

Not till it was quite dark and the lights had been lit in the shop, would the doctor turn about—often with a sigh too unconscious to be repressed—and face again the humble couple. But when he did so, it was to charm them with the most cordial and delightful conversation. There was even sparkle in it, but it was only for this aged pair of workers, whose wit was sufficient for appreciation, and whose hearts responded to every effort made to interest them by their much revered visitor. After a quarter of an hour of this hearty interchange of neighborly comment, he would leave the house, to come again a few evenings later.

But one evening there was a break in the usual order of things. The doctor was sitting, as he had sat a hundred times before, in his chair by the window, and Mr. Fanning was hammering away at his bench and Mrs. Fanning reading the Watchman, when there came a sound of voices from the front and the door burst open to the loud cry of—

“O Mrs. Fanning, Mrs. Fanning! Such news! Ephraim Earle has come back! Ephraim Earle, whom we all thought dead ten years ago!”

Mrs. Fanning, who with all her virtues dearly loved a bit of gossip, and who knew, or thought she did, everything that was going on in town, ran without ............