A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth's face.
"You're just as inconsistent as you can be!" she cried.

"I'm more than that," he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the
corner of the room; "I'm heartsick." He shivered, thrust his hands into
his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.

One of Mrs. Sandworth's cheerful capacities was for continuing
tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every
disturbance in the region of the emotions. You _had_ to, she said, to
get them done--anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took
advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps,
loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying
hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.

She answered him reasonably, "It wouldn't help Lydia any if I took it
off and threw it in the fire, would it? It's my best one, too; the
other's at the hairdresser's, getting curled."

"It's not," the doctor broke out--"it's not, Heaven be my judge! that
_I_ want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself."

"She has, at last," Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at
his forgetting so important a fact.

"She has _not_!" roared the doctor.

His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a
bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're
unkind. What did you tell me she had for--when I'm so tired it seems as
if I could lie down and die if I--"

Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the
obscurity of her brain into her heart's warm clarity, and, "Oh, Julia,
if you had seen her!" he cried.

She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. "Tell me
about it, poor Marius," she said, yearning maternally over his pain.

"I can't--if you had seen her--"

"But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did--"

"I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me
upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they
guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she'd
had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as
forbade him the house--"

Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. "Oh, if they've managed to
shut Lydia off from seeing him--"

The doctor nodded. "That's what her mother counted on. She said she
thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin--her being
so different a