about the girl’s enjoyment of her soda.  Hardly a man in the shop but was watching her.  Anderson gazed at her also, but with covert disgust and a resentment which was absurd.  He scowled at the young fellow with her.  He felt like a father whose daughter has been flouted by the man of her choice.  “What the devil does the boy mean, taking soda here with that Van Dorn girl?” he asked himself.  He felt like a reckoning with him, and chafed at the impossibility of it.  When the couple rose to go Anderson met the young man’s salutation with such a surly response and such a stern glance that he fairly started.  The men stared as the two went out, their shoulders touching as they passed through the door.  The girl was round-shouldered from careless standing, but she moved with a palpitating grace of yielding, and the smooth, fair braids which bound her head shone like silver.

“Guess that’s a go,” a man said, with a chuckle; “a narrower door would have suited them just as well.”

“Mighty good-looking girl,” said Amidon.

“Healthy girl,” said another.  “If more young fellows had the horse-sense to marry girls like that, I’d give up medicine and go on a ranch.”  The Banbridge doctor said that.  He was rather young, and had been in the village about five years.  He had taken the practice of an old physician, a distant relative who had died six months before.  Dr. Wilson was called a remarkably able man in his profession.  He had been having several prescriptions filled, and kept several waiting.  He was a large man with a coarsely handsome physique and a brutal humor with women.  He was not liked personally, but the people rather bragged about their great physician and were proud when he was called to the towns round about.

“There’s no getting Dr. Wilson, for a certainty, he has such an enormous practice!” they said, with pride.

“That girl is as handsome and healthy as an Alderney cow,” he added, now, and the men laughed.

“She’s a stunner,” said Amidon.

Anderson went out abruptly without waiting to make his purchase.  He felt as repelled as only a man of his temperament can feel.  No woman could equal his sense of utter disgust, first with the quite innocent girl herself, next with the young physician for his insistence upon the subject.  His wrath against young Eastman, his unreasoning and ridiculous wrath, swelled high as he dwelt upon the outrage of his desertion of a girl like his little Charlotte, that little creature of fire and dew, for this full-blown rose of a woman—­the outrage to her and to himself.  When he got home, his mother inquired anxiously what the matter was.

“Nothing, dear,” he replied, brusquely.

“You look as if something worried you,” said she.  She had been taking a little evening toddle on her tiny, slippered feet out in the old-fashioned flower-garden beside the house, and she had a little bunch of sweet herbs, which she dearly loved, in her hand.  She fastened a sprig of thyme in his coat as she stood talking to him, and the insistent odor seemed as real as a presence when he breathed. “nothing has gone wrong with your business, has there?” she inquired, lovingly.