To her mother she wrote merely, "Good-by. Think of me as well as you can till I am forgotten." Her thoughts of her mother were very bitter, for she felt that she had been neglected as a child, and permitted to grow up so faulty and superficial that she repelled the man her beauty might have aided her in winning; and it was chiefly through her mother that her last bitter and unendurable humiliation had come. Mrs. Mayhew bustled in from her drive with Stanton, just before dinner, and commenced volubly: "Glad to see you up and looking so much better." (Ida knew she was almost ghastly pale from the effects of the opiate and her distress, but she recognized her mother's tactics.) "Come now, go down with me and make a good dinner; then a drive this afternoon, to which Ik has invited you, and you will look like your old beautiful self." "I do not wish to look like my old self," said Ida coldly. "Who in the world ever looked better?" "Every one who had a cultivated mind and a clear conscience." "I declare, Ida, you've changed so since you came to the country that I can't understand you at all." "Do not try to any longer, mother, for you never will." "Won't you go down to dinner?" "No." "Why not?" "I don't wish to, for one thing; and I'm too ill, for another. Send me up something, if it's not too much trouble." "I'm going to have a doctor see you this very afternoon," said Mrs. Mayhew, emphatically, as she left the room. To do her justice she did send up a very nice dinner to Ida before eating her own. As far as doctors and dinners were concerned, she could do her whole duty in an emergency. "Isn't Ida coming down?" whispered Stanton to his aunt. "No. I can't make her out at all, and she looks dreadfully. You must go for a doctor, right after dinner." Van Berg could not hear their words, but their ominous looks added greatly to his disquietude. He had been too ill at ease to seek even Miss Burton's society during the morning, and had spent the time in making a sketch of Ida as she stood in the doorway before entering the parlor the previous evening. But Jennie Burton did not seem to feel or resent his neglect in the slightest degree. Indeed, her thoughts, like his own, were apparently engrossed with the one whose chair had been vacant so often of late, and who, when present, seemed so unlike her former self. "I fear you daughter is more seriously indisposed than you think," she said anxiously to Mrs. Mayhew. "I'm going to take Ida in hand," replied the matter-of-fact lady. "She IS ill--far more so than she'll admit. I'm going to have the doctor at once and put her under a course of treatment." "Curse it all!" thought Van Berg, "that is just the trouble. She has been under a course of treatment that would make any woman ill, save her mother, and I'm inclined to think that I was the veriest quack of them all in my treatment." "I wish she would let me call upon her this afternoon," said Miss Burton, gently.