“Sleep?” Maynard repeated, looking wanly at her.  “I never sleep.  I’d as soon think of digesting.”

After she had given him the needed instructions he rose from the rocking-chair in-which he had been softly swinging to and fro, and followed her out into the corridor, caressing with his large hand the child that lay on his shoulder.  “Of course,” she said, “Mrs. Maynard is still very sick, and needs the greatest care and attention.”

“Yes, I understand that.  But I reckon it will come out all right in the end,” he said, with the optimistic fatalism which is the real religion of our orientalizing West.  “Good-night, doctor.”

She went away, feeling suddenly alone in this exclusion from the cares that had absorbed her.  There was no one on the piazza, which the moonlight printed with the shadows of the posts and the fanciful jigsaw work of the arches between them.  She heard a step on the sandy walk round the corner, and waited wistfully.

It was Barlow who came in sight, as she knew at once, but she asked, “Mr. Barlow?”

“Yes’m,” said Barlow.  “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing.  I thought it might be Mr. Libby at first.  Do you know where he is?”

“Well, I know where he ain’t,” said Barlow; and having ineffectually waited to be questioned further, he added, “He ain’t here, for one place.  He’s gone back to Leyden.  He had to take that horse back.”

“Oh!” she said.

“N’ I guess he’s goin’ to stay.”

“To stay?  Where?”

“Well, there you’ve got me again.  All I know is I’ve got to drive that mare of his’n over to-morrow, if I can git off, and next day if I can’t.  Did n’t you know he was goin’?” asked Barlow, willing to recompense himself for the information he had given.

“Well!” he added sympathetically, at a little hesitation of hers: 

Then she said, “I knew he must go.  Good-night, Mr. Barlow,” and went indoors.  She remembered that he had said he would go as soon as Maynard came, and that she had consented that this would be best.  But his going now seemed abrupt, though she approved it.  She thought that she had something more to say to him, which might console him or reconcile him; she could not think what this was, but it left an indefinite longing, an unsatisfied purpose in her heart; and there was somewhere a tremulous sense of support withdrawn.  Perhaps this was a mechanical effect of the cessation of her anxiety for Mrs. Maynard, which had been a support as well as a burden.  The house was strangely quiet, as if some great noise had just been hushed, and it seemed empty.  She felt timid in her room, but she dreaded the next day more than the dark.  Her life was changed, and the future, which she had once planned so clearly, and had felt so strong to encounter, had fallen to a ruin, in which she vainly endeavored to find some clew or motive of the past.  She felt remanded to the conditions of the girlhood that she fancied she had altogether outlived; she turned her face upon her pillow in a grief of bewildered aspiration and broken pride, and shed tears scarcely predicable of a doctor of medicine.