CHAPTER XI

Dr. Cautley Sends in his Bill

“I wonder,” Mrs. Moon observed suddenly one morning, “if that man is going to let his bill run on to the day of judgment?”

The Old Lady had not even distantly alluded to Dr. Cautley for as many as ten months.  After the great day of what she called Juliana’s “resignation” she seemed to have tacitly agreed that since Juliana had spared her dream she would spare Juliana’s.  Did she not know, she too, that the dream is the reality?  As Miss Quincey, gentlewoman at large, Juliana had a perfect right to set up a dream of her own; as to whether she was able to afford the luxury, Juliana was the best judge.  Her present wonder, then, had no malignant reference; it was simply wrung from her by inexorable economy.  Juliana’s supplies were calculated to last a year; as it was the winter season that they had lately weathered, she was rather more than three-quarters of the way through her slender resources, and it behoved them to look out for bills ahead.  And Mrs. Moon had always suspected that young man, not only of a passion for mare’s-nesting, but of deliberately and systematically keeping back his accounts that he might revel in a larger haul.

The remark, falling with a shock all the greater for a silence of ten months, had the effect of driving Juliana out of the room.  Out of the room and out of the house, down High Street, where Hunter’s shop was already blossoming in another spring; up Park Street and past the long wall of St. Sidwell’s, till she found herself alone in Primrose Hill Park.

The young day was so glorious that Miss Quincey had some thoughts of climbing Primrose Hill and sitting on the top; but after twenty yards or so of it she abandoned the attempt.  For the last few months her heart had been the seat of certain curious sensations, so remarkably like those she had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it.  That, she understood, was the right treatment for hysteria.

But this morning Miss Quincey’s heart protested so violently against her notion of ascending Primrose Hill, threatening indeed to strangle her if she persisted in it, that Miss Quincey unwillingly gave in and contented herself with a seat in one of the lower walks of the park.  There she leaned back and looked about her, but with no permanent interest in one thing more than another.

Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to be moving there to a foregone conclusion.  And all the time her eyes were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the many-pointed leaves of a sycamore pricked against