seemed
so happy, it was a pity to hurry away and end these days sooner than
need be. It had been a charming surprise to find herself such a
desired companion, and again and again quite the queen of that little
court of frolickers, because lately she had felt like one who looks on
at such things, and cannot make part of them. Yet all the time that
she was playing she thought of her work with growing satisfaction. By
other people the knowledge of her having studied medicine was not very
well received. It was considered to have been the fault of Miss
Prince, who should not have allowed a whimsical country doctor to have
beguiled the girl into such silly notions, and many were the shafts
sped toward so unwise an aunt for holding out against her niece so
many years. To be sure the child had been placed under a most
restricted guardianship; but years ago, it was thought, the matter
might have been rearranged, and Nan brought to Dunport. It certainly
had been much better for her that she had grown up elsewhere; though,
for whatever was amiss and willful in her ways, Oldfields was held
accountable. It must be confessed that every one who had known her
well had discovered sooner or later the untamed wildnesses which
seemed like the tangles which one often sees in field-corners, though
a most orderly crop is taking up the best part of the room between the
fences. Yet she was hard to find fault with, except by very
shortsighted persons who resented the least departure by others from
the code they themselves had been pleased to authorize, and who could
not understand that a nature like Nan's must and could make and keep
certain laws of its own.

There seemed to be a sort of inevitableness about the visit; Nan
herself hardly knew why she was drifting on day after day without
reasonable excuse. Her time had been most carefully ordered and spent
during the last few years, and now she sometimes had an uneasy feeling
and a lack of confidence in her own steadfastness. But everybody took
it for granted that the visit must not come to an end. The doctor
showed no sign of expecting her. Miss Prince would be sure to resent
her going away, and the pleasure-makers marked one day after another
for their own. It seemed impossible, and perhaps unwise, to go on with
the reading she had planned, and, in fact, she had been urged to
attend to her books rather by habit than natural inclination; and when
the temptation to drift with the stream first m