'Not your patients, Doctor,' retorted Austin, laughing; 'though you are keeping them. One of them says you made an appointment with him. By the way he spoke, I think he was inwardly vowing vengeance against you for not keeping it.' 'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'we medical men do get detained sometimes. One patient has had the most of my time this day, poor lady!' 'Is she better?' quickly asked Florence, who always had ready sympathy for sickness and suffering: perhaps from having seen so much of it in her mother. 'No, my dear, she is dead,' was the answer, gravely spoken. 'And, therefore,' added the doctor in a different tone, 'I have no further excuse for absenting myself from those other patients who are alive and grumbling at me. Will you walk a few steps with me, Mr. Clay?' Dr. Bevary linked his arm within Austin's as they crossed the hall, and they went out together. 'How did you become acquainted with that dark secret' he breathed. 'Through a misdirected letter of Miss Gwinn's,' replied Austin. 'After I had read it, I discovered that it must have been meant for Mr. Hunter, though addressed to me. It told me all. Dr. Bevary, I have had to carry the secret all these years, bearing myself as one innocent of the knowledge; before Mrs. Hunter, before Florence, before him. I would have given half my savings not to have known it.' 'You believed that--that--one was living who might have replaced Mrs. Hunter?' 'Yes; and that she was in confinement. The letter, a reproachful one, was too explanatory.' 'She died this morning. It is with her--at least with her and her affairs--that my day has been taken up.' 'What a mercy!' ejaculated Austin. 'Ay; mercies are showered down every day: a vast many more than we, self-complaisant mortals, acknowledge or return thanks for,' responded Dr. Bevary, in the quaint tone he was fond of using. And then, in a few brief words, he enlightened Austin as to the actual truth. 'What a fiend she must be!' cried Austin, alluding to Miss Gwinn of Ketterford. 'Oh, but this is a mercy indeed! And I have been planning how to guard the secret always from Florence.' Dr. Bevary made no reply. Austin turned to him, the ingenuous look upon his face that it often wore. 'You approve of me for Florence? Do you not, sir?' 'Be you very sure, young gentleman, that you should never have got her, had I not approved,' oracularly nodded Dr. Bevary. 'I look upon Florence as part of my belongings; and, if you mind what you are about, perhaps I may look upon you as the same.' Austin laughed. 'How am I to avoid offence?' he asked.--'By loving your wife with an earnest, lasting love; by making her a better husband than James Hunter has been enabled to make her poor mother.' The tears rose to Austin's eyes with the intensity of his emotion. 'Do you think there is cause to ask me to do this, Dr. Bevary?' 'No, my boy, I do not. God bless you both! There! leave me to get home to those patients of mine. You can be off back to her.'