“You are the noblest girl I ever knew,” he said, with evident emotion. Then he added, with an effort at self-control: “But Dr. Winthrop begs the favor of an interview with you that he may personally express his gratitude for the inestimable gift you have bestowed upon him. I was commissioned to ask if you would receive him to-day—that is, if you feel able. Or,” as he studied her downcast face critically, “shall I tell him to wait until you are stronger?” He was at a loss how to explain her case; he could not understand it; it baffled him. He reasoned that, strong and vigorous as her constitution naturally was, she should have rallied at once; that a couple of weeks, at the most, should have served to put her where she was before. But nearly two weeks had already elapsed, and she had scarcely strength to turn on her pillow, while, strangest of all, she expressed no anxiety or impatience to get well and go about her duties again. Could he have read her heart, he would have been puzzled no longer. Could he have known that from the moment when he had led her to the young physician’s side, when she had looked into his face, and realized at a glance the kind of man he was—could he have known that as he was pumping the blood from her veins into his, all the finest and tenderest sensibilities of her nature were being absorbed in him, that henceforth she would feel herself a part of him, that life away from him would never hold any charm for her—he might not have wondered at her present condition; it would have explained everything to him, and then, perhaps, he might have felt that he was responsible for a broken heart as well as an impaired constitution. Strange as this may seem in a girl of such mental strength as Salome Howland, it was nevertheless true. She realized that she was no longer her own, that she had given herself with her life-blood to another, and that other a stranger whom she had seen but once, whom perhaps she might never see again, who—dreadful thought!—for aught she knew might already be the husband of another. She felt shamed, humiliated, terrified, when she awoke to a consciousness of such sentiments as these. Shamed and humiliated, because she had been so weak as to give her love unsought, and found that she had no power to rise above it; terrified because of the miserable blank that seemed to lie before her, if this man were destined to vanish as suddenly out of her life as he had come into it. How could she live with the mainspring of life—love—thus rudely wrenched out of her being forever? This was why she had no incentive, no real desire to recover—why the duties which hitherto had been the chief object of her life had suddenly lost their charm and interest. This, too, was why, when Dr. Hunt told her that Dr. Winthrop desired an interview, she was oppressed by a sudden sense of guilt, which caused her head to droop and the conscious color to leap to her very brow in a hot crimson tide.