“Dear Dr. Martin,” it began, “I have no little commission to trouble you with.  Tardif tells me it was quite a mistake, his mother taking a sovereign from me each week.  She does not understand English money; and he says I have paid quite sufficient to stay with them a whole year longer without paying any more.  I am quite content about that now.  Tardif says, too, that he has a friend in Southampton who will buy my hair, and give more than anybody in Guernsey.  So I need not trouble you about it, though I am sure you would have done it for me.

“I have not put my foot to the ground yet; but yesterday Tardif carried me all the way down to his boat, and took me out for a little sail under the beautiful cliffs, where we could look up and see all those strange carvings upon the rocks.  I thought that perhaps there were real things written there that we should like to read.  Sometimes in the sky there are fine faint lines across the blue which look like written sentences, if one could only make them out.  Here they are on the rocks, but every tide washes them away, leaving fresh ones.  Perhaps they are messages to me, answers to those questions that I cannot answer myself.

“Good-by, my good doctor.  I am trying to do every thing you told me exactly; and I am getting well again fast.  I do not believe I shall be lame; you are too clever for that.  Your patient,

     “OLIVIA.”

Olivia!  I looked at the word again to make sure of it.  Then it was not her surname that was Ollivier, and I was still ignorant of that.  I saw in a moment how the mistake had arisen, and how innocent she was of any deception in the matter.  She would tell Tardif that her name was Olivia, and he thought only of the Olliviers he knew.  It was a mistake that had been of use in checking curiosity, and I did not feel bound to put it right.  My mother and Julia appeared to have forgotten my patient in Sark altogether.

Olivia!  I thought it a very pretty name, and repeated it to myself with its abbreviations, Olive, Livy.  It was difficult to abbreviate Julia; Ju I had called her in my rudest school-boy days.  I wondered how high Olivia would stand beside me; for I had never seen her on her feet.  Julia was not two inches shorter than myself; a tall, stiff figure, neither slender enough to be lissome, nor well-proportioned enough to be majestic.  But she was very good, and her price was far above rubies.

According to the wise man, it was a difficult task to find a virtuous woman.

It was a quiet time in the afternoon, and in order to verify my recollection of the wise man’s saying, which was a little cloudy in my memory, I searched through Julia’s Bible for it.  I came across a passage which made me pause and consider.  “Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one by one, to find out the account:  which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not; one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.”