“That’s doing splendidly,” I told him.  “A little more patience for a couple of weeks and we’ll have you walking up and down the village, a living advertisement of my accomplishments.”

“A couple of weeks!” exclaimed Mr. Jelliffe.  “That sounds like three or four.  I know you fellows.  No one ever managed to get anything definite out of a doctor, with the possible exception of his bill.”

I laughed, but refused to commit myself by making any hard and fast promises, and Miss Jelliffe came in.

“Daddy enjoyed himself ever so much last evening,” she said.  “He likes Mr. Barnett and grows enthusiastic when he speaks of Mrs. Barnett.  I must say that I share his views.”

“They are made of the salt of the earth,” I asserted.

“Yes, there can be no doubt of that,” she said.  “But doesn’t it seem dreadful that a gently nurtured woman should be placed in such surroundings, with no means of obtaining anything but the barest needs of existence?  She has to stand all the worries of her own household and, in addition, is compelled to listen to the woes of all the others.”

“And any help that she can extend to them,” I added, “saving that of sympathy and kind words, is always at the cost of depriving herself and her little ones.  And yet she is doing it unceasingly, and goes about in shocking clothes and with a smile on her face, cheerfully, as if her path in life lay over a bed of roses.”

“That’s what I call a fine woman, and a good one,” said Mr. Jelliffe, “but I’m sure it is her devotion to that little man that has brought out all her fine points.  His people are her people and she has adopted his ideals.”

The front door was widely opened on this pleasant day, and, as I was finishing the dressing, Miss Jelliffe was dreamily looking out over the cove and following the circling gulls.  I think that, like myself, she wondered at the simplicity of it all.  A woman loved a man and clung to him, and from that moment their personalities merged, and their thoughts were shared, and a rough, rock-bound, fog-enwrapped land became, for all its hardships, a place where a man could do great work while the woman developed to the utmost her glorious faculties of helpfulness and tender unselfishness.

To me there could be no doubt that this couple had made of their union something very noble in achievement, though they were so quiet and simple about it all.  In so many marriages the partnership is but a poor doggerel, while in others it is a poem of entrancing beauty, filling hearts with happiness and heads with generous thought.

“You have been staring at me for a whole minute, Doctor,” said Mr. Jelliffe, suddenly.  “Anything particularly wrong or fatal in my general appearance?”

“I’m sure I beg your pardon,” I said, in some confusion.  “You are looking ever so well and I wish I could hurry your leg on a little faster.  Nature has ordained that bones will take just about so long to mend.  And now I am going away to play.  Practice happens to be quite slack to-day and Frenchy should be waiting outside with my rod.  I am going to see whether I cannot deceive an innocent salmon into swallowing a little bunch of feathers.”