“Is she ill?” Lawrence asked bluntly. “Oh, no, only ailing a little. The weather has been very trying the last week.” The doctor studied the visitor carefully. Paddy’s hurried return had caused him much food for anxious thought, coupled with her evident low spirits and loss of appetite. He shot a bow at a venture. “I think you come from Omeath?” he said. Lawrence assented, but seemed lost in thought. “Wouldn’t she see me just for a few minutes?” he asked. “I don’t want to worry her, but I have come from Omeath, and she might like to hear about them all at home.” The doctor went away, but came back again alone. “She is not well enough to-day,” he repeated. “She thanks you for calling and is sorry she cannot see you.” And Lawrence was obliged to call a cab again and drive away. As he went down the steps he met a slim youth who regarded him somewhat fixedly, but Lawrence never even saw him. He would have been a little amused, perhaps, had he known that the same youth shook his fist threateningly after him from behind the safe shelter of the doctor’s front door. “If you’re the cuss who’s worrying Paddy’s life out of her,” he mentally apostrophised Lawrence’s back, “I’d uncommonly like to have you in the dissecting-room,” which blood-curdling threat Basil was fortunately quite unable to carry out. Lawrence went back to his club and wrote a letter to Paddy. It was a beautiful letter. Nature had, of a truth, been erratic with this one of her children, for it seemed impossible that the writer of this letter and the man who could speak to his mother in a way that made her really ill for days could be one and the same. It distressed Paddy beyond words. In spite of everything she might say, his suffering tore her heart. Yet her will held firm, and she would not tell him to come. She wrote him a little letter, however, in which he perceived that she no longer pretended to be repulsed by him, and that absence might be serving him better than a meeting just then. He held the letter long in his hand, and was conscious of a sudden swift regret. “If there were more girls like her,” was his thought, “how much better it would be for us men and for all the world. If I had only loved her sooner, or some one like her, I should have been a different man to-day.” Ah, that eternal “if—if.” And meanwhile all things march on the same. The girls will not see, so the men do not heed, and there is folly and wrong and weakness where there might be strength and rich content. Where there is a great man there was a great woman before; and so it would seem Nature is always trying to point out to us that, though the Men have the strength, the Women have the power, and where they are strong and true all things are possible—for the fireside, the household, the sphere of influence at hand, the greatness of the nation itself. Be smart, be comely, be gay—why not?—only ring true also, and the men who admire you for your comeliness, will worship you for your goodness.