Only Lynn Gordon and the doctor knew the truth. Lynn had not told his grandmother of Anne's visit nor of her request. His grandmother was not one to whom he would have spoken of anything which had touched him keenly or moved him deeply. And he had even not told Doris, whom he would most naturally have trusted, certain of being understood, certain, too, of sympathy for Anne. A feeling of delicate consideration for Anne, a sense that she had trusted him, only because she could not do otherwise, that she had opened her reserved heart to him, who was almost a stranger, only because she was forced to do it, under terrible necessity,--all these mingled feelings had a part in holding him silent. To the doctor alone he felt that he should give a full account of what had taken place. But when he tried to tell even him, Lynn unexpectedly found it very hard to make Anne's motives and position as clear to another person as he had felt them to be. He realized for the first time that she had somehow made him feel much more than she had been able to put into words. She had so few words--poor Anne--and the few that she had were meagre indeed. The impulsive, warm-hearted young fellow stammered, and reddened, and laughed at himself, in a manly embarrassment that was a pleasant thing to see, as he tried clumsily to put the matter before the doctor in its true light, and in a way to do justice to Anne. Fortunately the doctor understood at once, and might have understood had the young man said even less than he finally found to say. That friend of humanity had learned something of Anne's character during her husband's long illness. Two earnest natures, stripped for a shoulder to shoulder contest with death over a sick-bed, come as near, perhaps, to knowing one another as any two souls may ever approach. A doctor's very calling, moreover, must reveal to him--as hardly the confessional can reveal to another man--the winding mazes of the simplest, sincerest woman's conscience. When the doctor went home after talking with Lynn, he tried to show his wife that there was no occasion for the widespread excitement over this unaccountable change in Anne. He hoped that an off-hand word to his wife might have some effect in settling the swirl of gossip which circled the village, faster and faster, with Anne's continued appearance at the card-table, as the continual casting of pebbles agitates a stagnant pool. But Mrs. Alexander, good, kind, charitable woman though she was, could only sigh and shake her head. She said that she had never understood Anne, but that she had always respected her sincerity, no matter how widely she herself might differ in opinion. But what could anybody think or say of Anne's sincerity now? The doctor's wife cast a shocked, frightened, glance at the Watson house. Such open, flagrant backsliding really was enough to make the lightning strike.