Here he was single-handed.  He was physician and surgeon and specialist and nurse in one.  He had few appliances and no assistant beside naked and primeval nature, the vast high spaces, the clean waters and clean air of the moors.

Yet it was precisely these things that his romantic youth had cried for—­that solitary combat and communion, that holy and solitary aid.

At thirty Rowcliffe was still in his romantic youth.

He had all its appearances about him.  A life of continual labor and discomfort had kept his body slender; and all the edges of his face—­clean-shaven except for its little dark moustache—­were incomparably firm and clear.  His skin was bronzed and reddened by sun and wind.  The fine hard mouth under the little dark moustache was not so hard that it could not, sometimes, be tender.  His irreproachable nose escaped the too high curve that would have made it arrogant.  And his eyes, keen and hard in movement, by simply keeping quiet under lowered brows, became charged with a curious and engaging pathos.

Their pathos had appealed to the little red-haired, pink-skinned, green-eyed nurse who had worked under him in Leeds.  She was clever and kind—­much too kind, it was supposed—­to Rowcliffe.  There had been one or two others before the little red-haired nurse, so that, though he was growing hard, he had not grown bitter.

He was not in the least afraid of growing bitter; for he knew that his eyes, as long as he could keep them quiet, would preserve him from all necessity for bitterness.

Rowcliffe had always trusted a great deal to his eyes.  Because of them he had left several young ladies, his patients, quite heart-broken in Leeds.  The young ladies knew nothing about the little red-haired nurse and had never ceased to wonder why Dr. Rowcliffe did not want to marry them.

And Steven Rowcliffe’s eyes, so disastrous to the young ladies in Leeds, saw nobody in Morfe whom he could possibly want to marry.  The village of Morfe is built in a square round its green.  The doctor’s house stands on a plot of rising ground on the north side of the square, and from its front windows young Rowcliffe could see the inhabitants of Morfe coming and going before him as on a stage, and he kept count of them all.  There were the three middle-aged maiden ladies in the long house on the west side of whom all he knew was that they ate far too many pikelets and griddle cakes for tea.  There were the two old ladies in the white house next door who were always worrying him to sound their chests, one for her lungs and the other for her arteries.  In spite of lungs and arteries they were very gay old ladies.  The tubes of Rowcliffe’s queer, new-fangled stethescope, appearing out of his coat pocket, sent them into ecstacies of mirth.  They always made the same little joke about it; they called the stethescope his telephone.  But of course he didn’t want to marry them.  There was the very old lady on the east side, who had had one