“Ay, Grace, the doctor was right when he said to me, 'Don't go there.' How well if I had but taken his advice! I am no longer fit for such associates. They live lives of easy security,--they have not the cares and struggles of a daily conflict for existence; we meet, therefore, on unequal grounds. Their sentiments cost them no more care than the French roll upon their breakfast-table. They can afford to be wrong as they can afford debt, but the poor wretch like myself, a bare degree above starvation, has as little credit with fine folk as with the huckster. I ought never to have gone there! Leave me now,” added he, half sternly; “let me see if these gases and essences will not make me forget humanity. No, I do not care for breakfast,--I cannot eat!” With the same noiseless step she had entered, she now glided softly from the room, closing the door so gently that it was only when he looked round that he was aware of being alone. For a moment or two he busied himself with the objects on the table; he arranged phials and retorts, he lighted his stove, he stood fanning the charcoal till the red mass glowed brightly, and then, as though forgetting the pursuit he was engaged in, he sat down upon a chair, and sank into a dreamy revery. Another low tap at the door aroused him from his musings, and the low voice he knew so well gently told him it was his morning to attend the dispensary, a distance fully three miles off. More than one complaint had been already made of his irregularity and neglect, and, intending to pay more attention in future, he had charged his wife to keep him mindful of his duties. “You will scarcely reach Ballintray before one o'clock, Herbert,” said she, in her habitually timid tone. “What if I should not try? What if I throw up the beggarly office at once? What if I burst through this slavery of patrons and chairmen and boards? Do you fancy we should starve, Grace?” “Oh, no, Herbert,” cried she, eagerly; “I have no fears for our future.” “Then your courage is greater than mine,” said he, bitterly, and with one of the sudden changes of humor which often marked him. “Can't you anticipate how the world would pass sentence on me, the idle debauchee, who would not earn his livelihood, but must needs forfeit his subsistence from sheer indolence?--ay, and the world would be right too. He who breaks stones upon the highroad will not perform his task the better because he can tell the chemical constituent of every fragment beneath his hammer. Men want common work from common workmen, and there are always enough to be found. I'll set out at once.” With this resolve, uttered in a tone she never gainsaid or replied to, he took his hat and left the cottage.