"No--no, perhaps not," said the little doctor, still wildly astonished. "It will be perhaps better, then, if henceforth you put us on the footing of strangers!" said Marian. "Marian!" exclaimed Mr. Creswell. "I mean what I said," she replied. "Had we been on that footing now, I should have been at my mother's bedside some days since!" And she walked quickly from the room. Dr. Osborne made two steps towards his hat, seized it, clapped it on his head, and with remarkably unsteady legs was making his way to the door, when Mr. Creswell took him by the arm, begged him not to think of what had just passed, but to remember the shock which Marian had received, the suddenness with which this new phase of her mother's illness had come upon her, etc. The little doctor did not leave the room, as apparently he had intended at first; he sat down on a chair close by, muttering-- "Treat her as a stranger rocked her on my knee brought her through measles! father died in my arms treat her as a stranger!" Two days afterwards Marian stood by the bed on which lay Mrs. Ashurst, dead. As she reverently arranged the gray hair under the close cap, and kissed the cold lips, she said-- "You did not enjoy the money very long, darling mother! But you died in comfort, at any rate and that was worth the sacrifice--if sacrifice it were!" CHAPTER XXVI. IN HARNESS. It was the autumn of the year, in the spring of which Walter Joyce had returned to London from Westhope. Six months had elapsed since he had read what he had almost imagined to be his death-warrant in Marian's reply to his letter containing the Berlin proposal. It was not his death-warrant; he had survived the shock, and, indeed, had borne the disappointment in a way that he did not think possible when the blow first fell upon him. Under the blessed, soothing influence of time, under the perhaps more effectual influence of active employment, his mind had been weaned from dwelling on that dread blank which, as he at first imagined, was to have been his sole outlook for the future. He was young, and strong, and impressionable; he returned to London inclined to be misanthropical and morose, disposed to believe in the breaking of hearts and the crushing of hopes, and the rather pleasant sensations of despair. But after a very short sojourn in the metropolis, he was compelled to avow to himself the wisdom of Lady Caroline Mansergh's prognostications concerning him, and the absolute truth of everything she had said. A life of moping, of indulgence in preposterous cynicism and self-compassion, was not for him; he was meant for far better things--action in the present, distinction in the future--those were to be his aims, and after a fortnight's indolence and moodiness, he had flung himself into the work that was awaiting him, and begun to labour at it with all his energy and all his brain-power.