Mr. Carlton explained. His talents were buried in South Wennock, he said, and he was really purposing a change. “You would like London, I think, Laura?”
“Yes, very much,” she answered; her vain head filling itself forthwith with sundry gay visions, popularly supposed to be capable of realisation in the metropolis only. “But you would never quit South Wennock,” she resumed, after a pause.
“Why would I not quit it?”
“You have found attractions in the place, if I have not.”
A momentary contraction of the brow, smoothed away as instantly, and Mr. Carlton was himself again. Not perfectly conscience clear, he hated above all things these allusions of his wife’s: he had thought the old trouble was dying away.
“Laura,” he gravely said, “South Wennock has no attractions for me; but the contrary. Should I leave it, I take its only attraction with me—yourself.”
She laughed. “It’s all very well for you to tell me so.”
“I swear it,” he said, in an earnest, almost a solemn, tone, as he bent to her and laid his hand impressively on her shoulder. “I have no attraction save yourself; whether in South Wennock or in the wide world.”
She believed him; she liked him still well enough to wish it. “But, Lewis, it has not always been so, you know.”
“I thought my wife promised me, when we were last upon this topic, to let bygones be bygones?”
“Did I? Well, I believe I did; and I will. Tell me about your dinner, Lewis. Was it very successful? How did you get on with your speeches?”
He gave her a laughing account of it all, and of the homage paid him. For nearly an hour they remained up, in gay, amicable converse; and when Laura went to rest that night, a vision dawned upon her of a future time when full confidence should be restored between them.
On the following day, Mr. Carlton proceeded to keep the appointment at Mrs. Smith’s. He called in about eleven o’clock, after visiting his patients on the Rise. He went straight into the cottage without knocking, and there happened to be nobody in the room but the child, who was seated in a little chair, with some toys on his lap, soldiers, whom he was placing in martial array.
“Are you the little fellow———”
So far spoke Mr. Carlton, and there he stopped dead. He had cast his eyes, wondering eyes just then, on the boy’s face, and apparently was confounded, or staggered, or something, by what he saw. Did he trace any likeness, as Judith had done? Certain it was, that he stared at the child in undisguised astonishment, and only seemed to recover self-possession when he saw they were not alone, for Mrs. Smith was peeping in from the staircase door.
“I thought I heard a strange voice,” quoth she. “Perhaps you are the doctor, who was to call?”
“I am,” replied Mr. Carlton.
He eyed her as he spoke almost as keenly as he had done the child. The woman had remarked his earnest gaze at the boy, and feared it was caused by the little one’s sickly look.
“He does look ill, I’m afraid,” she said. “Is that what you were struck with, sir?”
“No—no,” returned Mr. Carlton, half abstractedly; “he put me in mind of some one, that was all. What is his name?”
“Smith.”
“Where does he come from?”
“Well,” returned the woman, who had a blunt, abrupt way of speaking, the result of natural manner, not of intended incivility, “I don’t see what that has to do with it, or what it is to anybody in this place, which is strange to me and me to it. But if it’s necessary to know it, sir, he comes from Scotland, where he has lived all his life. He is my youngest child: the only one I have reared.”
“Was he born in Scotland?” asked Mr. Carlton, his eyes still riveted on the child.
“Whether he was born there, or whether he was born in New Zealand, don’t matter to the present question,” returned the woman, with a touch of irascibility, for she thought the surgeon had no right to pry into her affairs. “If you don’t like to treat my boy, sir, unless you first know the top and bottom of everything, there’s no harm done, and I’ll send for Mr. Grey.”
Mr. Carlton laughed pleasantly at her irritability, and rejoined in a courteous tone.
“It guides us very much sometimes to know what sort of a climate our patients have been living in, and whether they were born in it; and our inquiries are not usually attributed to idle curiosity, Mrs. Smith. But, come, let me see his knee.”
She undid the wrappings, and Mr. Carlton stooped down to examine the knee; but still he could not keep his eyes from the boy’s face. And yet there was nothing out of common in the face; unless it was in the eyes. Thin, pale, quiet features, with flaxen hair curling over them, were illumined by a pair of large, rich, soft brown eyes, beautiful to look at.
