“This man seems to be utterly lacking in masculine qualities. To give an illustration: The other day, when he thought I was absorbed in reading,--I must say that he has excellent taste in books,--I found tears trickling down his cheeks while he was reading before the fire. I noted from the division of the book as he held it open the approximate place where he was reading. Afterward I asked him for the book, and found that it opened readily at a place where the leaves were tear-stained. It was the silliest story imaginable,--a foolish account of true-lovers separated by designing persons and dying of a broken heart! Imagine a grown man crying over such nonsense as that! “Here is a queer circumstance that I have noted, and have wondered about: In not a single one of Dr. Malbone’s books does his name appear; and it is evident that wherever it did appear he has erased it. There may be easy ways of accounting for this, but to me it looks suspicious. Is it a part of the mystery of a refined and skilful physician burying--I believe hiding--himself in these mountains? I remember to have heard at the lakes that he never attended city people spending the summer here if he could avoid it. I certainly know that he refused to visit me, and that he sent me an insulting message besides. What is the reason? Is he more or less acquainted with people of the better class, and is he afraid of meeting some whom he may have known when he lived somewhere else and passed under a different name? The inhabitants of these mountains venerate him, and believe that his skill is omnipotent. Well, I have nothing to say against his skill, for certainly he has handled my case perfectly; but if these simple and ignorant mountain-folk should see him in the intimacy in which I know him, and discover what a cold, suspicious, weak, petty man he is, I think they would reform their opinion of him. “During the last month he has been going oftener and oftener through the back door. What business has he there? If I did not have a feeling that, little as he trusts me, I might safely trust him to the end of the world, I would have a fear for my own safety. But I rest secure in the belief that the prospect of collecting a generous fee for restoring me safe to my father is a sufficient protection, to say nothing of the confidence that I have in the man’s queer sense of honor. Why, he treats me as though I were a queen, and bears himself as my humblest subject hanging upon my smallest word--up to a certain point. Beyond that I get bewildered.