ot you,
doctor."

She smiled, and made a movement, but said nothing; and prepared to come
down, putting her plaid aside and rising. Had Solomon, in all his glory,
been handing down the Queen of Sheba, at his palace gate, he could not
have done it more daintily, more tenderly, more like a gentleman, than
did James, the Howgate carrier, when he lifted down Ailie, his wife.

The contrast of his small, swarthy, weatherbeaten, keen, worldly face to
hers--pale, subdued, and beautiful--was something wonderful. Rab looked
on concerned and puzzled, but ready for anything that might turn
up--were it to strangle the nurse, the porter, or even me. Ailie and he
seemed great friends.

"As I was sayin', she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor;
wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all
four; Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause
could be shown, willing also to be the reverse on the same terms. Ailie
sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck,
and, without a word, showed me her right breast. I looked at and
examined it carefully, she and James watching me, and Rab eying all
three. What could I say? There it was that had once been so soft, so
shapely, so white, so gracious and bountiful, so "full of all blessed
conditions"--hard as a stone, a center of horrid pain, making that pale
face, with its gray, lucid, reasonable eyes, and its sweet resolved
mouth, express the full measure of suffering overcome. Why was that
gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable, condemned by God to bear
such a burden?

I got her away to bed.

"May Rab and me bide?" said James.

"_You_ may; and Rab, if he will behave himself."

"I'se warrant he's do that, doctor;" and in slunk the faithful beast.

I wish you could have seen him. There are no such dogs now. He belonged
to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled, and gray like Rubislaw
granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body
thickset, like a little bull--a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He
must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt
head; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a
tooth or two--being all he had--gleaming out of his jaws of darkness.
His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of
fields of battle all over it; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as
was Archbishop Leighton's fath