"I have been busy. To-day especially. They had an accident at the works--two men were nearly drowned--and I have been with them all the morning." "I heard of it. Jelly brought me in the news; she seems to hear everything. How fortunate that you were at hand!" He proceeded, rather volubly for him, to give particulars of the accident and of the process he adopted to recover the men. Mrs. Cumberland looked and listened with silent, warm affection; but that she was a particularly undemonstrative woman, she would have betrayed it in her manner. In her eyes, there was not so fine and handsome and estimable a man in all Dallory as this her only son. "Oliver, what a dreadful thing this is about Edmund North! I have not seen you since. Why did you not come in and tell me the same night?" He turned his eyes on her for a moment in surprise, and paused. "I am not in the habit of coming in to tell you when called out to patients, mother. How was I to know you wished it?" "Nonsense, Oliver! This is not an ordinary thing: the Norths were something to me once. I have had Edmund on my knee when he was a baby; and I should have liked you to pay me the attention of bringing in the news. It appears to be altogether a more romantic event than one meets with every day, and such things, you know, are of interest to lonely women." Dr. Rane made no rejoinder, possibly not having sufficient excuse for his carelessness. He stood looking dreamily from a corner of the window. Phillis, as might be seen from there, was carrying away the fowl prepared for his dinner, and a tureen of sauce. Mrs. Cumberland probably thought he was watching with critical curiosity the movements of his handmaid. She resumed: "They say, Oliver, there has been no hope of him from the first." "There was very little. Of course, as it turns out, there could have been none." "And who wrote the letter? With what motive was it written?" proceeded Mrs. Cumberland, her grey face bent slightly forward, as she waited for an answer. "It is of no use to ask me, mother. Some people hold one opinion, some another; mine would go for little." "They are beginning now to think that it was not written at all to injure Edmund, but Mr. Alexander." "Who told you that?" he asked, a sharper accent discernible in his tone. "Captain Bohun. He came in this morning to tell me of the death. Considering that I have no claim upon him, that a year ago I had never spoken to him, I must say that Arthur Bohun is very kind and attentive to me. He is one in a thousand." Perhaps the temptation to say, "It's not for your sake he is so attentive," momentarily assailed Oliver Rane. But he was good-natured in the main, and he knew when to be silent, and when to speak: no man better. Besides, it was no business of his.