Now Dr. Douglass was honestly amazed at himself, because he was not pleased with this state of things.  Why was he not glad to discover that Dr. Van Anden was more of a man than he had ever supposed?  This would certainly be in keeping with the character of the courteous, unprejudiced gentleman that he had hitherto considered himself to be; but there was no avoiding the fact that the very thought of Dr. Van Anden was exasperating, more so this evening than ever before.  And the more his judgment became convinced that he had blundered, the more vexed did he become.

“Confound everybody!” he exclaimed at length, in utter disgust.  “What on earth do I care for the contemptible puppy, that I should waste thought on him.  What possessed the fellow to come whining around me to-night, and set me in a whirl of disagreeable thought?  I ought to have knocked him down for his insufferable impudence in dragging me out publicly in that meeting.”  This he said aloud; but something made answer down in his heart:  “Oh, it’s very silly of you to talk in this way.  You know perfectly well that Dr. Van Anden is not a contemptible puppy at all.  He is a thoroughly educated, talented physician, a formidable rival, and you know it; and he didn’t whine in the least this evening; he made a very manly apology for what was not so very bad after all, and you more than half suspect yourself of admiring him.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Dr. Douglass aloud to all this information, and went off to his room in high dudgeon.

The next two days seemed to be very busy ones to one member of the Ried family.  Dr. Douglass sometimes appeared at meal time and sometimes not, but the parlor and the piazza were quite deserted, and even his own room saw little of him.  Sadie, when she chanced by accident to meet him on the stairs, stopped to inquire if the village was given over to small-pox, or any other dire disease which required his constant attention; and he answered her in tones short and sharp enough to have been Dr. Van Anden himself: 

“It is given over to madness,” and moved rapidly on.

This encounter served to send him on a long tramp into the woods that very afternoon.  In truth, Dr. Douglass was overwhelmed with astonishment at himself.  Two such days and nights as the last had been he hoped never to see again.  It was as if all his pet theories had deserted him at a moment’s warning, and the very spirit of darkness taken up his abode in their place.  Go whither he would, do what he would, he was haunted by these new, strange thoughts.  Sometimes he actually feared that he, at least, was losing his mind, whether the rest of the world were or not.  Being an utter unbeliever in the power of prayer, knowing indeed nothing at all about it, he would have scoffed at the idea that Dr. Van Anden’s impassioned, oft-repeated petitions had aught to do with him at this time.  Had he known that at the very time in which he was marching