"I have lost the best nurse I ever had, or
shall have. I'll say that much for her; but I can't help feeling that
there was something wrong in her brain somewhere, which might have
cropped out again any day. Most extraordinary! most extraordinary!" And
Dr. Macgowan walked away with a certain lofty, indifferent air, which
English people so well understand, of washing one's hands of matters
generally.

There had, indeed, been a sore struggle between Hetty and her husband on
this matter of their being remarried by Father Antoine. When Dr. Eben
first said to her: "And now, what are we to do, Hetty?" she looked at
him in an agony of terror and gasped:

"Why, Eben, there is only one thing for us to do; don't we belong to
each other? don't you love me? don't you mean to take me home with you?"

"Would you go home with me, Hetty?" he asked emphatically; "go back to
Welbury? let every man, woman, and child in the county, nay, in the
State, know that all my grief for you had been worse than needless, that
I had been a deserted husband for ten years, and that you had been
living under an assumed name all that time? Would you do this?"

Hetty's face paled. "What else is there to do?" she said.

He continued:

"Could you bear to have your name, your father's name, my name, all
dragged into notoriety, all tarnished by being linked with this
monstrous tale of a woman who fled--for no reason whatever--from her
home, friends, husband, and hid herself, and was found only by an
accident?"

"Oh, Eben! spare me," moaned Hetty.

"I can't spare you now, Hetty," he answered. "You must look the thing in
the face. I have been looking it in the face ever since the first hour
in which I found you. What are we to do?"

"I will stay on here if you think it best," said Hetty. "If you will be
happier so. Nobody need ever know that I am alive."

Doctor Eben threw his arms around her. "Leave you here! Why, Hetty, will
you never understand that I love you?" he exclaimed; "love you, love
you, would no more leave you than I would kill myself?"

"But what is there, then, that we can do?" asked Hetty.

"Be married again here, as if we had never been married! You under your
new name," replied Doctor Eben rapidly.

Hetty's face expressed absolute horror. "We--you and I--married again!
Why Eben, it would be a mockery," she exclaimed.

"Not so much a mockery," her husband retorted, "as every thing that I
have done, and every thing that you have