My father lived ostensibly by his profession, but actually upon the income of my cousin, Julia Dobree, who had been his ward from her childhood.  The house we dwelt in, a pleasant one in the Grange, belonged to Julia; and fully half of the year’s household expenses were defrayed by her.  Our practice, which he and I shared between us, was not a large one, though for its extent it was lucrative enough.  But there always is an immense number of medical men in Guernsey in proportion to its population, and the island is healthy.  There was small chance for any of us to make a fortune.

Then how was it that I, a young man, still under thirty, was wasting my time, and skill, and professional training, by remaining there, a sort of half pensioner on my cousin’s bounty?  The thickest rope that holds a vessel, weighing scores of tons, safely to the pier-head is made up of strands so slight that almost a breath will break them.

First, then—­and the strength of two-thirds of the strands lay there—­was my mother.  I could never remember the time when she had not been delicate and ailing, even when I was a rough school-boy at Elizabeth College.  It was that infirmity of the body which occasionally betrays the wounds of a soul.  I did not comprehend it while I was a boy; then it was headache only.  As I grew older I discovered that it was heartache.  The gnawing of a perpetual disappointment, worse than a sudden and violent calamity, had slowly eaten away the very foundation of healthy life.  No hand could administer any medicine for this disease except mine, and, as soon as I was sure of that, I felt what my first duty was.

I knew where the blame of this lay, if any blame there were.  I had found it out years ago by my mother’s silence, her white cheeks, and her feeble tone of health.  My father was never openly unkind or careless, but there was always visible in his manner a weariness of her, an utter disregard for her feelings.  He continued to like young and pretty women, just as he had liked her because she was young and pretty.  He remained at the very point he was at when they began their married life.  There was nothing patently criminal in it, God forbid!—­nothing to create an open and a grave scandal on our little island.  But it told upon my mother; it was the one drop of water falling day by day.  “A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike,” says the book of Proverbs.  My father’s small infidelities were much the same to my mother.  She was thrown altogether upon me for sympathy, and support, and love.

When I first fathomed this mystery, my heart rose in very undutiful bitterness against Dr. Dobree; but by-and-by I found that it resulted less from a want of fidelity to her than from a radical infirmity in his temperament.  It was almost as impossible for him to avoid or conceal his preference for younger and more attractive women, as for my mother to conquer the fretting vexation this preference caused to her.