es since her marriage he had appealed to her for help, excusing
himself on the plea of difficulties and ill-health. The first time he
wrote, he alluded vaguely to having married, and to being compelled,
through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On receiving this
letter she made enquiries, and learned that, a month or two after her
departure from Lynbrook, Wyant had married a Clifton girl--a pretty
piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered about the lanes,
generally with a young man in a buggy. There had evidently been
something obscure and precipitate about the marriage, which was a
strange one for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured that it
might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton--or or perhaps he had
already succumbed to the fatal habit she had suspected in him. At any
rate he seemed, in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years
from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that, with his
talents, and the name he had begun to make, such a lapse could be more
than temporary. She had often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things
for him; but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous summer,
and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned by Wyant among his
misfortunes.

Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage to a rich man had not
given her the command of much money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard
themselves as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were scrupulous in
restricting their personal expenditure; and her work among the
mill-hands brought many demands on the modest allowance which her
husband had insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first appeal,
which reached her soon after her marriage, she had sent him a hundred
dollars; but when the second came, some two months later--with a fresh
tale of ill-luck and ill-health--she had not been able to muster more
than half the amount. Finally a third letter had arrived, a short time
before their leaving for New York. It told the same story of persistent
misfortune, but on this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct
appeal for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections, she
should help him to establish a New York practice. His tone was
half-whining, half-peremptory, his once precise writing smeared and
illegible; and these indications, combined with her former suspicions,
convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for medical work. At
any rate, she could not assum