“She is clever; she could act the part of a lady, no doubt,” moaned the one who possessed a clear title to that form of address.  “But she might be anything.  Why didn’t she tell you something of herself?  Jordan could not say that you knew the least thing about her.  People with fine family records are not so mysterious.  There is something wrong about her—­I know it—­I know it!  Oh, I can’t have it so; I can’t!  You must stop it, Doctor; you must!”

“She spent two weeks in our home,” Burns said.  “During that time there was no test she did not stand.  Come, Mrs. King, you know that it doesn’t take long to discover the flaw in any metal.  She rang true at every touch.  She’s a girl of education, of refinement—­why, Ellen came to feel plenty of real affection for her before she left us, and you know that means a good deal.  As for the mystery about her, what’s that?  Most people talk too much about their affairs.  If, as we think, she has been brought up in circumstances very different from these we find her in, it isn’t strange that she doesn’t want to tell us all about the change.”

But his patient continued to moan, and he could give her no consolation.  For a time he sat quietly beside the couch where lay the long and slender form, and he was thinking things over.  The room was veiled in a half twilight, partly the effect of closing day and partly that of drawn shades.  The deep and sobbing breaths continued until suddenly Burns’s hand was laid firmly upon the hand which clutched a handkerchief wet with many tears.  He spoke now in a new tone, one she had never before heard from him addressed to herself: 

“This,” he said, “isn’t worthy of you, my friend.”

It was as if her breath were temporarily suspended while she listened.  People were not accustomed to tell Mrs. Alexander King that her course of action was unworthy of her.

“No man or woman has a right to dictate to another what he shall do, provided the thing contemplated is not an offense against another.  You have no right to set your will against your son’s when it is a matter of his life’s happiness.”

She seized on this last phrase.  “But that’s why I do oppose him.  I want him to be happy—­heaven knows I do!  He can’t be happy—­this way.”

“How do you know that?  You don’t know it.  You are just as likely to make him bitterly unhappy by opposing him as by letting him alone.  And I can tell you one thing surely, Mrs. King:  Jordan will do as he wishes in spite of you, and all you will gain by opposition will be not a gain, but a sacrifice—­of his love.”

She shivered.  “How can you think he will be so selfish?”

Burns had some ado to keep his rising temper down.  “Selfish—­to marry the woman he wants instead of the woman you want?  That’s an old, old argument of selfish mothers.”

The figure on the couch stiffened.  “Doctor Burns!  How can you speak so, when all I ask for is my son’s best good?” The words ended in a wail.