He returned to give Miss Ruston his sanction of her project, and to receive her half-mocking, wholly grateful acknowledgment.

“And I hope, Dr. Burns,” said she, as he took leave of her, his watch in his left hand as he shook hands with his right, “that you will let me make that photograph of you, at the very beginning of my stay here.”

“With a clump of hollyhocks behind me, or a ’queer old door’?” he inquired.

“With nothing behind you except darkness and mystery,” said she.

“I thought those were the things one looked toward, not out of?”

“Your patients looking toward ‘the black unknown,’ and seeing your face, must find their future lighted with hope!”

He turned and looked at his wife, a sparkle in his eye.  “She’s from the big town,” said he.  “Here in the country we don’t know how to give fine, fascinating blarney like that, eh?  Good-bye, Miss Ruston, and good luck.  Bring the little grandmother carefully wrapped in jeweller’s cotton—­nothing is too good for her!”

When luncheon was over Mrs. Burns and her guest went off for a long drive, Miss Ruston being anxious to explore the region of which she had heard as offering a field for her camera.  The drive, taken in the Macauley car, by Martha’s invitation, and in the company of Martha herself, Winifred Chester, and several children, prevented much confidential talk between the two friends, and it was not until a few minutes before train time, at five o’clock, that the two were for a brief space again alone together.

“I’m so sorry you are not to be here at dinner,” Ellen said, as Miss Ruston repacked her small travelling bag, while the car waited outside to take her to the station.  “I should have liked you to meet our guest, Dr. Leaver.  He is an old friend of my husband’s, who has been ill and is here convalescing.  He over-tired himself in taking a walk this morning, and has been resting in his room all the afternoon.”

Charlotte Ruston, adjusting a smart little veil before Ellen’s mirror, her back to her friend, asked, after a moment’s pause: 

“Dr. Leaver?  Not Dr. John Leaver, of Baltimore?”

“Yes, indeed.  Do you know him?”

“I have met him.  Is he ill?  I hadn’t heard of that.”

“He has worked very hard, and is worn out,” explained Ellen, choosing her terms carefully.  Her husband had warned her against allowing any definite news concerning Leaver to get back to his home city.  “He is improving, and we are keeping him here because it is a place where he can be out of the world, for a time, and not be called upon to go back before he should.  So please don’t mention to your Baltimore friends that he is here.  I am ever so sorry, if you know him, that he wasn’t down to-day.  It might have done him good to see the face of an acquaintance.”

“It might be too stimulating for him,” suggested Miss Ruston.  She seemed difficult to satisfy in the matter of the veil’s adjustment.  Though she had had it fastened, she now took it off and began again to arrange it.