“She’s the one way always,” was the reply; “and it wasn’t of you I was thinking, Doctor, but standing I was to watch that ruffian of a pig of Mr. Rourke’s that had me grand cabbages eat last night, and me in Cloon buying a pound of madder to colour a petticoat.  Ah, then, look at him now standing there by the wall watching me out of the corner of his eye!” and flourishing her stick the energetic old lady trotted off to the attack.

“I may as well go in and see Mary,” muttered the Doctor, tying the reins to an isolated gate-post, and walking up the narrow lane to the thatched cottage it led to.

“God save all here,” he said, putting his head in over the half-door.

“God save you kindly,” was the reply from an old man in corduroy knee-breeches and a tall hat, who sat smoking a short pipe in the deep chimney-corner, and watching with interest the assault of various hens and geese upon the heap of potato-skins remaining in a basket-lid which had done duty as a dinner-table.

The Doctor passed through to a little room beyond, whitewashed and containing a large four-post bed.  The invalid, a gentle, consumptive-looking girl, lay on the pillows and smiled a greeting to the Doctor.

His eye, however, passed her, and rested with startled curiosity on a visitor who was sitting by her side, and who rose and bowed slightly.  The stranger was a lady, young and slight, with dark eyes and hair and a small, graceful head.  He guessed at once she must be Miss Eden, the new Resident Magistrate’s sister, of whose ministrations to the poor he had heard much since his return from his late holiday.

He stopped awkwardly, rather confused at so unexpected a meeting; but the stranger held out her hand, and looking up at him said:  “I am so glad you have come back; we have wanted you so much.”

The Doctor did not answer.  The sweet, low voice, with no touch of Irish accent, was a new sound to him, the little hand that she gave him was fairer and smaller and more dainty than any he had ever touched.  To say the truth, his early farm-house life and his hospital training and dispensary practice had not brought him into contact with much refinement, and this girl with her slight, childlike figure and soft, earnest eyes seemed to him to have stepped from some unreal world.  Then, finding he still held the little hand, he blushed and let it go.

“How are you getting on, Mary?” he asked, turning to his patient.

“Middling, sir, thank you,” said the girl.  “I do have the cough very bad some nights, but more nights it’s better; and the lady, may God enable her, has me well cared.”

“I could not do much,” said the lady, with an appealing glance, “and you must not be angry with me for meddling with your patients.  But now that you have come I am sure Mary will be better.”

“Don’t be troubling yourself about me,” said the sick girl, gently.  “I’ll never be better till I see Laurence again.”