When she entered her room to dress for dinner that evening, she took down her frocks and laid them on the bed, and stood a while in deep thought. She must look her best tonight. She chose a simple cream dress with chiffon round the bodice and sleeves. Halfway through her toilette she clasped her white arms over her neck, and looking in the glass held long converse with her image. It seemed so strange that she, with all her imperfections of soul and body, should be chosen to guide a man's destiny. Then lighter fancies prevailed, and she spent anxious moments in arranging her thick auburn hair. When she came down at last, with a diamond-hilted dagger thrust through the coils, and a bunch of violets peeping shyly from the chiffon in her corsage, Matthew paid her an old man's compliment. “Do I look nice?” she asked, gratified. “I'm glad; for you once told me that you liked me in this frock.” There are times when the sincerest of women can be most blandly deceitful. ***** A general practitioner may propose to himself many pleasant occupations for his spare hours, but his patients dispose of them effectually. On this particular day, when Sylvester craved leisure to watch over Leroux and to open his heart finally to Ella, impossible people fell sick at interminable distances, tiny human beings came with preposterous haste into this world of trouble, and larger ones gave sudden and alarming symptoms of leaving it. It was one of those well-known days of sudden stress when a country doctor eats his meals standing and wearing his overcoat. Finally, an evening visit from which he reckoned on being free by nine kept him by an anxious bedside till nearly eleven. But he had found time to despatch to Ella a few lines scribbled on a leaf of his pocket-book:-- _Dearest,--I can't come, much as I long to. Will see you in the morning. S. L._ This was almost the first letter he had ever written to her; certainly the first love-letter. The new sweetness of it soothed Ella's disappointment. At half-past eleven he reached his house, a very weary man. He put on his slippers, stretched himself, yawned, and thought wistfully of bed. But first he must go to Leroux, whom he had only seen at odd intervals during the day. He was pouring himself out some whisky when the housekeeper entered the dining-room, smoothing her apron. “I'm glad you 've come, Mr. Sylvester. He's took worse, nurse says. His temperature has gone up to 104.”