"I wonder if she'll hunt?" remarked Joey. "Gaunt's a good horseman in spite of his lameness. Just fancy seeing him about this winter with a pretty wife in tow! It's simply too rippin'--best news I've heard for a long time." "Hallo! Who's this riding the wrong way?" said her husband suddenly. "If it isn't the doctor. Hallo, Dymock, where are you off to on such a grand morning?" he cried, stopping the engine. "Give you three guesses," said Dymock, drawing rein with a grin on his clever, keen face. "But you won't guess in fifty." "Got it in one," shouted Joey. "You're going to Omberleigh, I can see it in your eye." "You're a wizard, Mrs. Ferris. Have you seen her, then?" "What, the bride? You don't say you're going to see her?" "I saw her yesterday," burst in Percy, "and she looked as well as--well, as health itself." "Old Gaunt is not satisfied, however," replied Dymock. "It's probably nothing much, but he says she seems a bit run down. I suppose I must expect to be sent for if her little finger aches." "Sure," laughed Ferris. "He looks as if he wishes he could cause her to become invisible when any one of the male sex is passing by. Just the age to make a fool of himself, isn't he? Well, if you're passing our way later, look in, won't you?" "You'll be wasting your whisky, Ferris. I don't give away my patients." Ferris grinned. "Welcome, anyway," he said, as he and his wife drove on. Dr. Dymock pursued his road, his mind as he rode up through the pinewoods being filled with as lively a curiosity as even the couple from Perley Hatch confessed to feeling. What like was the girl--for Ferris said she was a girl, and beautiful at that--who could have married Gaunt? Hemming showed him into the study. It surprised him vaguely to find the house as untidy and dingy as usual--the abode of a woman-hating bachelor, untouched by the coming of a fair young mistress. Certainly the affair had been very sudden. Gaunt joined him almost at once, his own appearance just as normal and unchanged as that of his house. "I must begin with hearty congratulations," observed the doctor, shaking hands cordially. "Ferris, it appears, caught a glimpse of Mrs. Gaunt yesterday, and he says she is perfectly lovely." "Thanks. Yes, my wife is certainly pretty, but I fear she is not very strong. As I think I hinted to you in my note, she was bitten with the idea which infects many girls nowadays--this notion of taking up Work, with a capital W. She has been scrubbing floors and cooking meals--laying tables and lighting fires. It has been quite too much for her. She told me nothing of it, and I was inconsiderate enough to take her a long ramble over the estate yesterday. She was so done up afterwards that I persuaded her to stay in bed to-day until you had seen her." It was frankly and quite pleasantly said. The doctor applauded the new-made husband's care, and was taken upstairs, under Grover's escort, to the room where his patient lay.