Perhaps I ought not to have referred to it. And yet that is not a fair code of friendship. When a friend tells you his affairs, he makes them yours, and you have a right to ask about them afterwards. I longed to ask,--longed to know all and everything. For by every carriage-lamp we passed, I saw that his face was not as it used to be, that there was on it a settled shadow of pain, anxiety--almost anguish. I have only known Doctor Urquhart three months, yet in those three months I have seen him every week, often twice and thrice a-week, and owing to the pre-occupation of the rest of the family, almost all his society has devolved on me. He and I have often and often sat talking, or in "playing decorum" to Augustus and Lisabel, walked up and down the garden together for hours at a time. Also, from my brother-in-law, always most open and enthusiastic on the subject, I have heard about Doctor Urquhart nearly everything that could be told. All this will account for my feeling towards him, after so short an intimacy, as people usually feel, I suppose, after a friendship of years. As I have said, something must have happened to make such a change in him. It touched me to the quick. Why not, at least, ask the question, which I should have asked in a minute of anybody else,--so simple and natural was it.-- "Have you been quite well since we saw you?" "Yes.--No, not exactly. Why do you ask?" "Because I thought you looked as if you had been ill." "Thank you, no. But I have had a great deal of anxious business on hand." More than that he did not say, nor had I a right to ask. No right! What was I, to be wanting rights--to feel that in some sense I deserved them--that if I had them I should know how to use them. For it is next to impossible to be so sorry about one's friends without having also some little power to do them good, if they would only give you leave. All this while Colin and his mother were running hither and thither in search of the carriage, which had disappeared again. As we stood, a blast of moorland wind almost took my breath away. Doctor Urquhart turned, and wrapped me up closer. "What must be done? You will get your death of cold, and I cannot shelter you. Oh, if I could!" Then I took courage. There was only a minute more. Perhaps, and the news of threatened war darted through my mind like an arrow--perhaps the last minute we might ever be together in all our lives. My life--I did not recollect it just then, but his, busy indeed, yet so wandering, solitary, and homeless--he once told me that ours was the only family hearth he had been familiar at for twenty years. No, I am sure it was not wrong, either to think what I thought, or to say it. "Doctor Urquhart, I wish you would come to Rockmount. It would do you good, and papa good, and all of us; for we are rather dull now Lisabel is gone. Do come."