home his pretty bride and Esther, a shy,
silent child of eleven, had welcomed her, she had known that the
newcomer was the weaker spirit. The bride had known it too. She had
never attempted to control Esther, leaving the child entirely to her
father--a bit of unwitting wisdom which did much to smooth daily life
at the Elms. If the doctor saw his wife's weakness of character it is
probable that it did not interfere with his love for her. Why need she
be strong while he was strong enough for two? But he had forgotten one
thing--the day when she would have to be strong alone!

The realisation came to him upon his death-bed. Esther was sure of this.
He could not speak, but she had read the message of his eyes, the appeal
to the strength in her to help the other's weakness. No getting away
from the solemn charge of that entreating look!

* * * * *

Esther was thinking of that look now, as she sat alone in the dusk of
the veranda. Tea was over and Aunt Amy was putting Jane to bed. From her
mother she had had no word. Blank silence had met her when she had taken
the tea tray upstairs and called softly through the closed door. Mrs.
Coombe was probably asleep. She would be better to-morrow; but before
long she would be ill again, and the interval between the attacks was
becoming shorter.

There was anger as well as anxiety in the girl's mind. Her healthy and
straightforward youth had little patience with her step-mother's
unreasonable caprices. For her illness she had every sympathy, but for
the morbid nervousness which seemed to accompany it, none at all. These
constant headaches, the increasing nervous irritability from which Mrs.
Coombe suffered lay like a shadow over the house. Yet the sufferer
refused to take the obvious way of relief and persisted in her refusal
with a stubbornness of which no one would have dreamed her light nature
capable. Still, willing or unwilling, something must be done. Aunt Amy,
too, was becoming more of an anxiety. Once or twice lately she had
spoken of "Them," a sign of mental distress which Dr. Coombe had always
treated with the utmost seriousness. Perhaps if a doctor were called in
for Aunt Amy, Mrs. Coombe would lose her foolish dread of doctors and
allow him to prescribe for her also. And if the new doctor were half as
clever as Mrs. Sykes said he was--Esther's heart began to warm a little
as her fancy pictured such a pleasant solution of all her problems. Th