“You don’t believe in me?  You don’t think I would do it?”

“I don’t believe in myself.  I have no right to doubt you.  I know that I ought to honor you for what you propose.”

“I don’t think it calls for any great honor.  Of course I shouldn’t propose it to every lady physician.”  He smiled with entire serenity and self-possession.  “Tell me one thing:  was there ever a time when you would have consented?” She did not answer.  “Then you will consent yet?”

“No.  Don’t deceive yourself.  I shall never consent.”

“I’ll leave that to the logic of your own conscience.  You will do what seems your duty.”

“You must n’t trust to my conscience.  I fling it away!  I won’t have anything to do with it.  I’ve been tortured enough by it.  There is no sense or justice in it!”

He laughed easily at her vehemence.  “I ’ll trust your conscience.  But I won’t stay to worry you now.  I’m coming again day after to-morrow, and I’m not afraid of what you will say then.”

He turned and left her, tearing his way through the sweet-fern and low blackberry vines, with long strides, a shape of uncouth force.  After he was out of sight, she followed, scared and trembling at herself, as if she had blasphemed.

XI.

Grace burst into the room where her mother sat; and flung her hat aside with a desperate gesture.  “Now, mother, you have got to listen to me.  Dr. Mulbridge has asked me to marry him!”

Mrs. Green put up her spectacles on her forehead, and stared at her daughter, while some strong expressions, out of the plebeian or rustic past which lies only a generation or two behind most of us, rose to her lips.  I will not repeat them here; she had long denied them to herself as an immoral self-indulgence, and it must be owned that such things have a fearful effect, coming from old ladies.  “What has got into all the men?  What in nature does he want you to marry him for?”

“Oh, for the best reasons in the world,” exclaimed the daughter.  “For reasons that will make you admire and respect him,” she added ironically.  “For great, and unselfish, and magnanimous reasons!”

“I should want to believe they were the real ones, first,” interrupted Mrs. Breen.

“He wants to marry me because he knows that I can’t fulfil my plans of life alone, and because we could fulfil them together.  We shall not only be husband and wife, but we shall be physicians in partnership.  I may continue a homoeopath, he says, and the State Medical Association may go to the devil.”  She used his language, that would have been shocking to her ordinary moods, without blenching, and in their common agitation her mother accepted it as fit and becoming.  “He counts upon my accepting him because I must see it as my duty, and my conscience won’t let me reject the only opportunity I shall have of doing some good and being of some use in the world.  What do you think I ought to do, mother?”