consciously at the girl. "You're Miss
Breen, ain't you?"

"Yes," she said, with lady-like sweetness and a sort of business-like
alertness.

"Well," suggested the driver, "this is for Miss Grace Breen, M. D."

"For me, thank you," said the young lady. "I'm Dr. Breen." She put
out her hand for the little package from the homoeopathic pharmacy in
Boston; and the driver yielded it with a blush that reddened him to his
hair. "Well," he said slowly, staring at the handsome girl, who did not
visibly share his embarrassment, "they told me you was the one; but I
could n't seem to get it through me. I thought it must be the old lady."

"My mother is Mrs. Breen," the young lady briefly explained, and walked
rapidly away, leaving the driver stuck in the heavy sand of Sea-Glimpse
Avenue.

"Why, get up!" he shouted to his horses. "Goin' to stay here all day?"
He craned his neck round the side of the wagon for a sight of her.
"Well, dumm 'f I don't wish I was sick! Steps along," he mused, watching
the swirl and ripple of her skirt, "like--I dunno what."

With her face turned from him Dr. Breen blushed, too; she was not yet
so used to her quality of physician that she could coldly bear the
confusion to which her being a doctor put men. She laughed a little to
herself at the helplessness of the driver, confronted probably for the
first time with a graduate of the New York homoeopathic school; but she
believed that she had reasons for taking herself seriously in every way,
and she had not entered upon this career without definite purposes. When
she was not yet out of her teens, she had an unhappy love affair, which
was always darkly referred to as a disappointment by people who knew
of it at the time. Though the particulars of the case do not directly
concern this story, it may be stated that the recreant lover afterwards
married her dearest girl-friend, whom he had first met in her company.
It was cruel enough, and the hurt went deep; but it neither crushed nor
hardened her. It benumbed her for a time; she sank out of sight; but
when she returned to the knowledge of the world she showed no mark of
the blow except what was thought a strange eccentricity in a girl such
as she had been. The world which had known her--it was that of an inland
New England city--heard of her definitely after several years as a
student of medicine in New York. Those who had more of her intimacy
understood that she had chosen this work with the intention