"Glad to see you, Mr. Bladesden! You seem to have been driving fast! But you come just in time, for I was about starting in a hurry to--to see a patient." Had Dr. Pomeroy been aware of all the circumstances connected with the morning call of the merchant--the shameful revelations made in the little room overhead--the agony of spirit in which the Quaker had forced himself away from the presence of Eleanor Hill, deserting her utterly and leaving her in such a state of suffering as made suicide very possible--and the continued and ever-deepening conflict which had since been going on in his mind, as he dashed along roads that led him nowhere, his horses foaming in the heat but the heat in his brain a thousand times more intense, until at last he had driven back determined to drag the young girl, at every hazard and sacrifice, from that moral pest-house which must be sure infection and death to her soul,--had Dr. Pomeroy known all this, we say, not even his hardy spirit might have been willing to brave the encounter. But he knew nothing, and some of the perilous consequences of ignorance followed. "I did not come to see _thee_, Dr. Philip," replied the Quaker to his salutation, passing on meanwhile towards the front door, and something short and choppy in his words indicating that he did not wish to open his mouth at full freedom. "I saw thy ward, Eleanor Hill, this morning, and I am going to see her again." "Ah, you have been here to-day, then, before? And you are going to see her again, after--." It was surprising, for a man of his age and experience, how near he came to saying a word too much! "After receiving _thy letter_?--yes!" answered the Quaker, turning short and confronting his quondam host, the restraint on his utterance removed. "_My_ letter? What do you mean by my letter?" Had any one told Philip Pomeroy, half an hour before, that there was a man living who in five words could change the color on his cheek, he would have reckoned the informant a liar and grossly insulted him. Yet so it was; and the flush, though it was already growing into that of defiant anger, had not been such when it began to rise. "Thee does not seem to understand me, Dr. Philip," said the Quaker, his words still slow and no point of the sectarian idiom lost, but each dropping short and curtly as if a weighty substance falling heavily. "But thee will understand me before I am done. Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A True Friend'--" "You lie!" A terrible word, to be flung into the teeth of any man; and doubly terrible as hurled from lips then ashy white. For just one instant the Quaker's large hands clutched, and he might have been moved to advance upon his insulter and avenge Eleanor Hill, himself and all the world, by choking the insult from his throat. But if such a thought really moved him, he controlled it and merely smote on with his words.