at I love you, Iris, love you!"

* * * * *

Her eyes were as luminous as the stars that shone upon the breast of
night. If the heavens had suddenly opened, she could not have been more
surprised. Her first love letter! At a single bound she had gained her
place beside those fair ladies of romance, who peopled her maiden
dreams. From to-night, she stood apart; no longer a child, but a woman
worshipped afar, by some gallant lover who feared to sign his name.

She put out the candle, for the moonlight filled the room, and pattered
across the polished floor, in her bare feet, to her little white bed,
the letter in her hand.

"Rose bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst."

The hours went by and still Iris was awake, the mute paper crushed close
against her breast. "I wonder," she murmured, her crimson face hidden in
the pillow, "I wonder who he can be!"

VII

Friends

The Doctor's modest establishment consisted of two rooms over the
post-office. Here his shingle swung idly in the Summer breeze or
resisted the onslaughts of the Winter storms. The infrequent patient
seldom met anyone else in the office, but in case there should be two at
once, a dusty chair had been placed in the hall.

Both rooms were kept scrupulously clean by the wife of the postmaster,
who lived on the same floor, but the bottles ranged in orderly rows upon
the shelves were left severely alone, because the ministering influence
lived in hourly dread of poison.

Here the family physician of East Lancaster lived out his monotonous
existence. When he had first taken up his abode there, he had set up his
household gods upon the hill, in company with his countrymen. He soon
found, however, that his practice was confined to the hill, and that,
for all he might know to the contrary, East Lancaster was unaware of his
existence.

It was the postmaster who first set him right. "If you're a-layin' out
to heal them as has the money to pay for it," he had said, "you'll have
to move. This yere brook, what seems so innocent-like, is the chalk mark
that partitions the sheep off from the goats. You'll find it so in every
place. Sometimes it's water, sometimes it's a car track, and sometimes a
deepo, but it's always there, though more 'n likely there ain't no real
line exceptin' the one what's drawn in folks' fool heads. I reckon,
bein' as you're a doctor, you're familiar