Dr. Burnet had behaved extremely well during all these years. He had not been like the rector. He had borne no malice, though he had greater reason to do so had he chosen. He never now made use of her Christian name and never allowed himself to be betrayed into any sign of intimacy, never lingered in her presence, never even looked at the tea on the little tea-table over which he had so often spent pleasant moments. He was now severely professional, giving her his account of his patient in the most succinct phrases and using medical terms, which in the long course of her father’s illness Katherine had become acquainted with. But he had been as attentive to Mr. Tredgold as ever, people said; he had never neglected him, never hesitated to come at his call night or day, though he was aware that he could do little or nothing, and that the excellent nurse in whose hands the patient was was fully capable of caring for him; yet he always came, putting a point of honour in his sedulous attendance, that it never might be said of him that he had neglected the father on account of the daughter’s caprice and failure. It might be added that Mr. Tredgold was a little revenue to the doctor--a sort of landed estate producing so much income yearly and without fail--but this was a mean way of accounting for his perfect devotion to his duty. He had never failed, however other persons might fail. He came into the drawing-room very quietly and unannounced. He was not himself quite so gallant a figure as he had been when Katherine had left him _planté là_; he was a little stouter, not so perfect in his outline. They had both suffered more or less from the progress of years. She was thinner, paler, and he fuller, rougher--almost, it might be said, coarser--from five years more of exposure to all-weathers and constant occupation, without any restraining influence at home to make him think of his dress, of the training of his beard, and other small matters. It had been a great loss to him, even in his profession, that he had not married. With a wife, and such a wife as Katherine Tredgold, he would have been avowedly the only doctor, the first in the island, in a position of absolute supremacy. As it was a quite inferior person, who was a married man, ran him hard, although not fit to hold a candle to Dr. Burnet. And this, too, he set down more or less to Katherine’s account. It is to be hoped that he did not think of all this on the particular evening the events of which I take so long to come to. And yet I am afraid he did think of it, or at least was conscious of it all in the midst of the deeper consciousness of his mission to-night. He could scarcely tell whether it was relief or pain he was bringing to her--a simpler or a more complex existence--and the sense of that enigma mingled with all his other feelings. She rose up to meet him as he came in. The room was dimly lighted; the fire was not bright. There was no chill in the air to make it necessary.