I saw him at the breakfast-table the next morning.  He was noting something in his memorandum book, which excused him from offering me his hand; but he spoke kindly, said he was glad to see me, hoped I was well, and could find a breakfast that I liked.

“For some reason or other, I do not eat so much as I did in Surrey.”

Alice laughed, and I blushed.

“What do you think, Charles?” she said, “Cassandra seems worried by the influence, as she calls it, you have upon each other.”

“Does she?”

He raised his strange, intense eyes to mine; a blinding, intelligent light flowed from them which I could not defy, nor resist, a light which filled my veins with a torrent of fire.

“You think Cassandra is not like you,” he continued with a curious intonation.

“I told her that your oddities never troubled me.”

“That is right.”

“To-day,” I muttered, “Alice, I shall go back to school.”

“You must ride,” she answered.

“Jesse will drive you up,” said Charles, rising.  Alice called him back, to tell him her plan of the Boston visit.

“Certainly; go by all means,” he said, and went on his way.

I made my application to father, telling him I had nothing to wear.  He answered with haste, begging me to clothe myself at once.

CHAPTER XVII.

It was November when we returned from Boston.  One morning when the frost sparkled on the dead leaves, which still dropped on the walks, Helen Perkins and I were taking a stroll down Silver Street, behind the Academy, when we saw Dr. White coming down the street in his sulky, rocking from side to side like a cradle.  He stopped when he came up to us.

“Do ye sit up late of evenings, Miss Morgeson?”

“No, Doctor; only once a week or so.”

“You are a case.”  And he meditatively pulled his shaggy whiskers with a loose buckskin glove.  “There’s a ripple coming under your eyes already; what did I tell you?  Let me see, did you say you were like father or mother?”

“I look like my father.  By the way, Doctor, I am studying my temperament.  You will make an infidel of me by your inquiries.”

Helen laughed, and staring at him, called him a bear, and told him he ought to live in a hospital, where he would have plenty of sick women to tease.

“I should find few like you there.”

He chirruped to his horse, but checked it again, put out his head and called, “Keep your feet warm, wont you?  And read Shakespeare.”

Helen said that Dr. White had been crossed in love, and long after had married a deformed woman—­for science’s sake, perhaps.  His talent was well known out of Rosville; but he was unambitious and eccentric.

“He is interested in you, Cass, that I see.  Are you quite well?  What about the change you spoke of?”