emas of John Berrian were taking unspoken shape as he sat at table; "and I was peculiarly a fool in not knowing her then. That is, my temperament runs toward suspicion and caution, as poor Dinwiddie's here does toward sympathy and affection and headlong heart; and yet? My special sort of weakness has lost me precisely what his sort of weakness has gained him-the one woman of all the world! Thank you, madam, I will take another cup of tea!" he added aloud; and had it been a cup of corrosive sublimate from her hand it would have been a little more welcome; for it is a great mistake to suppose stolid, solid, square-headed, weightily spoken men like this man have no feelings. A rhinoceros has as thick a skin and as horny a countenance as mortal could wish, and yet, when, the other day in the Zoological Gardens, the pet poodle-dog living with the rhinoceros was accidently crushed under its great foot and died, they say that the brute refused food two days; and it would be interesting to know whether its chief occupation during that time lay in mourning its favorite or in cursing itself. "What was it, Gertrude?" That was all that Dr. Dinwiddie said, when their guest was gone, and after the children were asleep. He "Only this, my dear," his wife, who had been singularly silent since Mr. Berrian's departure, replied, "that, as I said, Mr. Berrian and I were a good deal together when he was studying law. was freckled and awkward and very sober, as men of his kind always are when young. He thought I had no sense, you know; but I had sense enough, silly girl though I was, to know that he would develop into a strong man." "Well?" asked her husband, but not quite so promptly as before. "You know before you ask, Charles," his wife went on. "I was living in an obscure little town, and had seen nothing of young men. A more foolish and ignorant girl never lived, and I had a good deal of love to bestow on somebody, as I had no parents, brothers, nor sisters-" "And you did love him?" interrupted her husband. "I could have learned to love him, I do suppose, Charles," the lady said, steadily. "But-" "Your cruel guardian interposed," her husband added for her, not very cheerily. | "I understand, Gertrude. Go on. He knew that a young man of that sort would soon make himself rich," the husband said, and then added only one word, "Yes"; but, oh, how much of the essence of wormwood was condensed into the little word! None the less his wife was ready. "Charles!" and there was even more of the essence of all antidote in the sweetness of that word. "Yes," his wife continued, "he did think so. And I do believe Mr. Berrian did sincerely desire to love me. I am satisfied he tried as heartily to do so as, under the circumstances, a man of his strong and deliberate character could. Perhaps he actually did." It was pardonable to Mrs. Dinwiddie's sex that she should add that much for herself. "I would not be surprised, Charles, from things I saw to-day, as well as then, if he had at least begun to love me. But he had too much self-control to yield to it." "Yield to it!" There was a measure of surprise in the wondering eyes of the husband as he made the exclamation which was beautiful beyond words to his wife. "Why, Gertrude, what do you mean?" he asked, with a stupidity which was delicious to her. "I was very young, Charles. I had read little, and had seen nothing. And I was so absurdly happy, too. The truth is, I neither knew nor cared any more about anything, or anybody, or myself even, than if I was a squirrel or a butterfly. declare I don't think I had any more soul in those days than if I was a flower. I enjoyed myself, and was happy, and that was absolutely all. He thought me frivolous and foolish, and—” I "He was a thick-headed fool," suggested her husband. "No, he was not," his wife said, with the simplicity of good sense. "I knew that he would be much more than he then seemed-knew it, because I am a woman. He could anticipate nothing about me, because he is a man. There are a pair of you," she added, with a laugh. "Mr. Berrian's leading trait is self-control, and he carried it too far. Your characteristic, darling, is self-sacrifice and surrender, and "I do suppose I am like a planet that is all sea, nothing but storms and calms, ebbs and floods," her husband replied. "I love too much! You know how painfully I become interested in my patients. But all that is nothing-" upon his lips in a kiss which was also a sacrament. They went soundly asleep upon it. Every syllable she said was true, but then there was a great deal more which was also true, and along the same line of remark, true and terribly true. The husband knew it, but it was the weakness of the man that he shut his eyes to it, because it was so unpleasant to know, and hurried himself, so to speak, to sleep as soon as he could. Mrs. Dinwiddie knew it also-knew it perfectly-and yet she would have denied it to others as she did to herself, would have denied it had Ithuriel himself, with spear in hand, questioned her upon the subject. In some His wife understood him. Her husband had been trained in religion, his father having been a layman remarkable, as was his mother also, for fervent piety and work among the poor. A personal and passionate love for the One whom John so loved was the leading trait of Dr. Dinwid-subtle fashion the visit of John Berrian die, and his distress was in being apparently repulsed and abandoned by the Person to whom he chiefly looked. "Events happen to you as to all the universe besides," Berrian had often reasoned with him, "along the path of law. Our Maker presides and governs-yes, and with minute attention-but you must submit to Him. He is very great, as well as very good. Believe and wait." But this was to set up a Deity worse than of stone or gold; it was to worship a God of ice, and the impulsive physician indignantly refused to do so. "You think you are like John," said his friend, "but you are headlong Peter instead," and gave him up. The renewed her very girlhood in her. children wondered and rejoiced in her songs and smiles and kisses. "I feel, darlings," she explained to them, "as I used to do hundreds of years ago, when I was a blooming, silly girl, when I lived among the clouds and the berries, the birds and the beautiful mornings, the old times when I was a very happy girl and nothing else in the world." II. Mr. John Berrian settled himself in St. Louis, and went to work with a will. For years he had intended to do so, and had corresponded and made every possible provision in view of the step, and no man "It would have been a great deal better could have more thoroughly known what for you, Gertrude," Dr. Dinwiddie said, he was about than he did when he took at slowly, as he undid his neckerchief for the last his place at the St. Louis bar. It is night, "if you had married Berrian. A wonderful what a power there is in the terrible time you have had of it with me. slow inertia of such a man. There is such I would to Heaven-" a solid and steady assumption of things on the part of such that everybody yields as if to a law of nature; and there is not an atom of sensitive feeling or of shrinking in such a man when, as will sometimes occur, somebody or something turns up which refuses to yield. It was merely an opportunity for the heavy-built, strongwilled lawyer to put on more momentum. Not that he was ever brutal; he had the energy of silence, of patience, of the profound strategy which lies in unswerving persistence. No man more courteous, more free from giving anybody a reasonable ground against him, but none of all the legal fraternity more steadily mounted, and all the higher, upon the very billows of opposition. In a word, John BerShe faced him, a hand holding firmly rian, having neither wife nor child, gave upon each of his shoulders, and then very himself to the gaining of money, reputadeliberately laid her complete womanhood | tion, power, as exclusively as a steam-ship "Dr. Dinwiddie," his wife said, laying a hand on either of his shoulders, and looking full into his eyes, and thinking them, as she did so, the most beautiful in the world, "I am to-night a very different woman from what John Berrian once supposed me to be-very superior to that, I know myself to be. And, Charles," she added, with a new color in her cheek, and a sparkle in her eyes of the light of earlier days, "I saw to-day that he knows it now. Well, all that I am now I owe to you, sir. You have been to me what that wandering knight was in the story to Undine-you have developed a soul in me. With all there is of it I love you for yourself, dear, and I love you over again for myself." gives itself to getting over the Atlantic to Liverpool. He was blessed with a strong digestion, not more of his food than of the toughest and most varied cases of law, and he so thrived and broadened upon it all, in money as in reputation, in forehead as in shoulders, that men began to get into the habit of yielding before him as ordained of nature, like an on-coming summer, so to speak, or ripening autumn. Even his personal enemies began to calculate upon Berrian as a future judge, Governor, United States Senator, or whatever other powerful antagonist he might sooner or later come to be. his wife would say to Mr. Berrian when he called in her husband's absence. "He gives himself so completely to a patient that his very interest exhausts him. If the person dies, he worries over the question of how it would have been had he pursued another treatment. But what hurts him most, Mr. Berrian, is when, after having done all he can, perhaps to a patient who can pay him nothing, and with the devotion of a brother, he is suddenly discharged. It hurts him so! He can not eat, can not sleep. He is so ardent in his affections that any repulse grieves him as if he was a girl." And it showed the difference between the wife and her husband that she should have used that illustration in speaking to Mr. Berrian, so completely had she forgotten herself in her husband. And a man knows and enjoys such things even when he does not think about them. To such a degree did Berrian believe in himself that a visit from the prosperous lawyer was an event in the Dinwiddie household. So ruddy was the cleanshaven guest, not to say fair and portly, so hearty was his laugh, and free was he from care, and full of joke, that Charley and even Gerty accepted him like an installment in advance of Christmas. The 'Yes; he is so made," the wife replied, whole family was the happier for his vis-"that either he knows nothing whatever it, and for days afterward. "Pardon me, madam," her visitor hastened to say, "but, considering the brilliant ability of the doctor, he looks to and leans upon-no, I should say, trusts to— people beyond any one I ever met." 66 in regard to a person, or, when he does, that person becomes too much to him. It is almost a heart-disease," Mrs. Dinwiddie added, "he loves and trusts and looks to and depends on others so! Rather, it is the fault of his imagination: he considers people as being so very superior to what they actually are: and he never can get used to being coldly and badly treated; it astonishes and wounds him every time as if that was his first experience. He is what you have doubtless read, Mr. Berrian, of poets like Keats and Shelley." "He is one of the purest and noblest men I ever knew, madam," the lawyer said; "one of the most loving and lova The case of Dr. Charles Dinwiddie, on the other hand, can be best summed up in saying that it was the exact reverse of all this. Not that he was not more talented than his friend: everybody knew that he had brilliant talent, yet somehow it seemed as extravagant a thing for Dr. Dinwiddie to have as if it had been instead a superbly jewelled gold watch, let us say. Nor could any one have studied harder. Well qualified when he entered his profession, he had given himself to reading with the same almost fierce energy as to all else. Apart from the recreation which lay in loving and petting and being very dearly loved by his family, his one relax-ble of men. In money matters I happen ation was his microscope, and he rigor- to know him to be as unselfish as a child. ously confined himself with that to the Will you pardon me if I say that, with study of animal tissues, the coagulations all his talent and mastery of his profesof lymph and the like, the crystallizations sion, he is a child. I have known him, of poisons, peering as deeply into nature Mrs. Dinwiddie, since he was a boy, and I and as widely as he could, and all in the can not see any change in him; and then interests of medicine. Nor was it possi- he is what I fear I am not," the lawyer ble for a man to give himself more sedu- added, in a lower tone-"a devoted Chrislously to a patient. Rich or poor, that tian." But that parlor was the only spot patient was to him for the time his one in the world in which the sturdy lawyer thought; cheerfully, patiently, unweary- indulged in any sentimentality of that ingly, Dr. Dinwiddie tended upon the fe- kind. There was a plenty of things outvered brow, or the broken bone, or the side of it to drag him away from the preloathsome disease. To that all agreed. sent and toward the future, but every"That is the trouble with your friend," | thing in that small brick house laid hold upon and drew him, and with yet greater power, toward the past, and toward all he was before he had so broadened and hardened himself toward the conquest of the world. True, John Berrian was ashamed of that little parlor when he was in the court-house; but then he was still more thoroughly ashamed of office and court when he was in the parlor. The past is purest and sweetest. Mrs. Dinwiddie never alluded, any more than did her husband, to their private matters in conversation with the lawyer or any one else. None the less did Berrian know that they were having a very severe struggle of it indeed. Once Mr. Berrian had managed to lay hold upon and dispose in advance of a suit that was about to be brought against his friend for a large debt. By what quirks and legal evasions it was done only a lawyer could, for a fee, describe to you. And the awful measure of what is elsewhere called lying, which a legal practitioner can at least witness unmoved, even take a part in, so far as a solemn silence at the time is concerneda measure of this was illustrated curiously in the case that follows. Mr. Berrian had called at Dr. Dinwiddie's after an absence of some weeks. He thought it a little curious at the time that Mrs. Dinwiddie did not come into the parlor during his whole stay. But the doctor was at home, and he understood her absence afterward. "I must tell you," the doctor, after other talk, said at last, "of an extraordinary thing that has befallen me. My wife laughs at me for my trust in human nature, notwithstanding a good many sharp disappointments. Why, sir, a few weeks ago I received a letter from New Orleans inclosing a larger check than I like to say, and so arranged that I can find out nothing about it. All that was written wasLet me see; here it is," and the physician produced from the prescription-book taken from his breast pocket a paper which he laid in the hands of his friend. "There is so much rascality in the world! I wish one of the scamps owing me would have a twinge of the same conscience. How are the children?" and the visitor went gravely off into a narrative of a peculiarly cool-blooded murder trial in which he was engaged. A St. Louis man had butchered his wife, as Dr. Dinwiddie knew from the papers, and Mr. Berrian had undertaken his defense. He laid before his friend the line of argument he proposed pursuing, his confident hopes of success. It all resulted in a very warm discussion as to the moral right of the lawyer to rescue such a brute from the gallows, which lasted until Mr. Berrian left. "If he but knew how I disposed of the big fee I made that scoundrel pay me in advance!" the lawyer said to himself as he walked home. "But he never will find out. I made a bad botch of it in supposing she would not know instantly. She will never tell him, anyhow. Ah, Miss Gertrude Osborne, you are a thousand times stronger than your husband. Yes, you fool, and ten thousand times stronger than you are." After which compliment to himself the bronzed veteran of Themis, having got home, sat for an hour in his chair, thinking and thinking before he went to bed. None of his "cases" half so interesting as this. Yet that astute gentleman knew none of the details of the daily life at the Dinwiddies'. None the less, he could almost have noted it down, and truthfully too, in general, if not in particulars of date and exact circumstance. That very day Mrs. Dinwiddie had gone, with a woman's instinct that they were thinking, although only in their hearts, of dismissing her husband, to see the family in which was the daughter dying with consumption. It was as delightful a visit as such a visit could be, and very short; nor was a word said about Dr. Dinwiddie; but, on the whole, after that the family preferred keeping their doctor to the chance of the patient's getting well in the care of some "Humph!" the lawyer said, suspicious- one else. Just before the anonymous asly, and then read it, and very coldly, too. sistance came, Mrs. Dinwiddie had man"Please accept the inclosed. It is from aged that their landlord should call for a sincere admirer of Dr. Charles Dinwid- his long-deferred rent when the doctor die's noble nature, as well as his eminent was out, and, in virtue of remaining so ability as a medical man. From a grate-perfect a lady through a painful interview ful patient of old." with a very coarse capitalist indeed, she "You are sure the check was honor- had diverted that hurt at least from her ed?" the other said, as he examined the husband's soreness. Dr. Dinwiddie took paper critically, turning it over and over. | frequent occasion afterward to stigmatize "Wherever I go," he said to his wife, "I hear perpetual complaint of the servants. I can see for myself what an awful trial some of them must be. How singularly we have been favored in our girls! They are so lady-like and obliging this last, Emily, for instance, what a good servant she is!" warmly the manner in which his land- | Bridgets of the kitchen. Not a syllable lord had been slandered as a grasping of exasperated brogue ever marred the scoundrel, and his wife sweetly assented doctor's peace. to all he said of that individual as being a very gentlemanly person indeed. "I wonder, my darling, if it is not because he sees that I am a gentleman?" he said; and the Jesuit at the other end of the table did not even wince, and thought, "I shouldn't wonder," but, being too truthful for that, remarked, instead, "Everybody who knows you, dear, knows that. And there was the suit threatened against her husband for malpractice. The doctor was actually in the house, in his office in the basement, when the virago called to threaten him in regard to it. It was a case of charity practice, and well did the wife know how her husband would suffer from such treatment at the hands of those whom he supposed to be full of gratitude and love for his months of unpaid and untiring toil! Mrs. Dinwiddie had not planned any dealing with it before. To such a woman, with such an affection for her husband, there was something in the doing, when opportunity came, of all she did, as easy as is to an angel the curve it makes in flying. She happened to open the door, somehow, before the hostile visitor could ring; she had the blackmailing vixen in the parlor before she could say a word. She assumed that the wretch was as much a lady as herself from the outset. Only the Being who gives us what to say when the moment comes, whether we stand before kings or blackguards, knows how Mrs. Dinwiddie managed it; but when the intruder had got home again it was only to praise the doctor's wife as a "raal lady, if there iver was one," and suddenly to refuse to allow the affair to go on against their doctor. To the day of his death that physician knew nothing about his escape from that much of sleeplessness and acute suffering. You might as well try to number the variations of a summer's breeze as to specify the deeds of this true wife. Somehow the bills never got to the husband's eyes, or the amounts for beef and bread, butter and gas, coal and coffee, broke in at least their first violence upon her bosom. Some women write poetry; she put as much genius into economizing. Ladies there are so charming as to conquer even the women they meet in parlors as well as the men; Mrs. Dinwiddie achieved her social successes over the Biddies and the Mrs. Dinwiddie was hard put to it not to fib on this as on many like occasions. Had the doctor overheard the impudence which that same Emily had, an hour before, at least attempted to give her mistress, he would have hurried her out of the house in five minutes, to have been worried about it for five weeks afterward. His estimate of his very children would have been altered had it not been for those household wings which were not swifter to fly than they were careful to cover and to conceal, for the love which feeds its young is that also which broods. And oh, the stealthy tread and the hushing hand upon the children from their birth, and when they were sick, lest they should wake her husband! In the same way, why worry him about them when he was awake, unless, indeed, it was essential, the solemn fact being that, excellent physician as the doctor was, his wife was a far better, so far at least as her children and herself were concerned. No wonder Mrs. Dinwiddie guarded her husband's sleep! Like all men of his temperament, he could not endure loss of sleep; added to long-continued trouble, it almost crazed him. They had suffered much before John Berrian came, but his coming seemed to be the beginning of ever-increasing troubles, which even the wife's almost omnipotent love could not prevent. Patients could not pay. New theories of medicine became popular, which Dr. Dinwiddie abhorred and denounced. Political influence deprived him of the charge of a hospital. in which he had deposited failed. Houses which his wife owned in another city stood untenanted. An astute physician, in whose plausible manners the doctor had trusted, and with whom he had formed a temporary partnership, first seduced away his patients, and then slandered him. The richest family in his practice went to Europe. The details are not necessary, for afflictions cluster by a law as certain A bank |