have made him hope to be preferred to her
father--above all, by her mother. Nor could she clearly understand
from him what had dispelled his hopes. Something it was that took
place at the picnic on Arthur's Seat, of which she had previously heard
as a period of untold bliss. That something, still left in vague
mystery, had sealed the fate of the two friends.

'And so,' said Dr. Spencer, 'I took the first foreign appointment that
offered. And my poor father, who had spent his utmost on me, and had
been disappointed in all his sons, was most of all disappointed in me.
I held myself bound to abide by my rash vow; loathed tame English life
without her, and I left him to neglect in his age.'

'You could not have known or expected!' exclaimed Ethel.

'What right had I to expect anything else? It was only myself that I
thought of. I pacified him by talk of travelling, and extending my
experience, and silenced my conscience by intending to return when
ordinary life should have become tolerable to me--a time that never has
come. At last, in the height of that pestilential season in India,
came a letter, warning me that my brother's widow had got the mastery
over my poor father, and was cruelly abusing it, so that only my return
could deliver him. It was when hundreds were perishing, and I the only
medical man near; when to have left my post would have been both
disgraceful and murderous. Then I was laid low myself; and while I was
conquering the effects of cholera, came tidings that made it nothing to
me whether they or I conquered. This,' and he touched one of his white
curling locks, 'was not done by mere bodily exertion or ailment.'

'You would have been too late any way,' said Ethel.

'No, not if I had gone immediately. I might have got him out of that
woman's hands, and made his life happy for years. There was the sting,
but the crime had been long before. You know the rest. I had no
health to remain, no heart to come home; and then came vagrancy indeed.
I drifted wherever restlessness or impulse took me, till all my working
years were over, and till the day when the sight of your father's
wedding-ring showed me that I should not break my mad word by accepting
the only welcome that any creature gave me.'

'And, oh! surely you have been comforted by him?'

'Comforted! Cut to the heart would be truer. One moment, I could only
look at him as having borne off my treasure to destroy it; but then
there ros