e into a
small London practice.'

'And then you will leave us?'

'I am afraid so. There are many friends I shall miss--that I shall be
very sorry to leave, but--'

'Oh, of course it would not do to miss such a chance.'

They fell to discussing the patient, and when the doctor left, Alice
proceeded to carry out his instructions concerning the patient, and,
these being done, she sat down by the bedside and continued her thoughts
of him with a sense of pleasure. She remembered that she had always
liked him. Yes, it was a liking that dated as far back as the spinsters'
ball at Ballinasloe. He was the only man there in whom she had taken the
slightest interest. They were sitting together on the stairs when that
poor fellow was thrown down and had his leg broken. She remembered how
she had enjoyed meeting him at tennis-parties, and how often she had
walked away with him from the players through the shrubberies; and above
all she could not forget--it was a long sweet souvenir--the beautiful
afternoon she had spent with him, sitting on the rock, the day of the
picnic at Kinvarra Castle. She had forgotten, or rather she had never
noticed, that he was a short, thick-set, middle-aged man, that he wore
mutton-chop whiskers, and that his lips were overhung by a long dark
moustache. His manners were those of an unpolished and somewhat
commonplace man. But while she thought of his grey eyes her heart was
thrilled with gladness, and as she dreamed of his lonely life of labour
and his ultimate hopes of success, all her old sorrows and fears seemed
to have evaporated. Then suddenly and with the unexpectedness of an
apparition the question presented itself: Did she like him better than
Harding? Alice shrank from the unpleasantness of the thought, and did
not force herself to answer it, but busied herself with attending to her
sister's wants.

While the dawn of Alice's happiness, Olive lay suffering in all the dire
humility of the flesh. Hourly her breathing grew shorter and more
hurried, her cough more frequent, and the expectoration that accompanied
it darker and thicker in colour. The beautiful eyes were now turgid and
dull, the lids hung heavily over a line of filmy blue, and a thick scaly
layer of bloody tenacious mucus persistently accumulated and covered the
tiny and once almost jewel-like teeth. For three or four days these
symptoms knew no abatement; and it was over this prostrated body,
weakened and humiliated by illness, t