CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

THE FAMILY PHYSICIAN.

On entering the doctor's office, Laure found him examining Bela's eye, or rather the part of the face that once contained that valuable organ.

"How do, Doctor," said Laure; "how are you, Bela? Now that you are well, why do you not return to your mistress?"

"Missy don't want see Bela now he got only one eye."

"We'll see about that," said Dr Fox. "Glad you came in, Laure. I was about experimenting on the boy's eye. We'll see if we can't send you back to your mistress with a new optic!"

As he said this he lifted Bela's eyelid, and in another second the boy stood before the men with two eyes in his head, though one was but a glass eye.

"Hello!" said Laure, "what hinders you now from going home to your mistress? You are nearly as good-looking as you ever were! By the way, Doctor I wish you would drop in and see Mrs Laure. She does not look well."

"Sorry to hear that," said the doctor. "I will call there this morning and take Bela with me." The two men exchanged a few more words and then parted. Some hours later Bela, accompanied by the doctor, entered his old home dressed in a most fantastic costume, and expressed, in his peculiar way, the greatest joy at seeing his mistress, who was well pleased to receive him again. She greeted the doctor cordially, and was curious about this new eye of Bela's.

"How did you ever do it?" she asked.

Pleased to see her interested, the doctor slipped the shell that so skilfully simulated the destroyed organ of sight, and showed her how it was inserted.

"It is easy enough. You could do it yourself," said he.

Dainty felt a childish desire to try. She had none of that horror of mutilation that most delicate women have, for her life had made her familiar with the sight of physical afflictions. The doctor, though he secretly wondered at her curiosity, was willing to indulge it, and Dainty soon found that she could actually adjust a glass eye herself.

Bela was dismissed, and her look of interest gave place to one of weariness. "Well, Mrs Laure, what is the reason I have not seen you riding of late?"

The blood flew to her cheeks, for she felt that the doctor was reading her heart. With the desire that every woman has to guard her dearest secret, she said:

"Donald imagines I am threatened with fever. It is nothing but a feeling of homesickness. To be sure my heart beats so at times that it nearly chokes me, but I think it will soon pass away. I have been coaxing Mr Laure to take me away from the Fields. I think if I were near the old ocean once more my health would return."

The doctor listened to her voice, but he only heard her mental words. The words she framed with her lips did not conceal the cause of her distress. We think to deceive the world when we talk to cover our feelings, but how rarely do we succeed with the good and true. The soul sits in the silence. Its influences are silent influences, and its voice soft and gentle. So, as it is attuned to stillness, it hears other soul voices when in harmony with it, and it discerns the truth with unerring judgment.

Dr Fox had diagnosed mental struggles until it had become second nature to him to read the thoughts of his patients. He had also been keenly alive to the infatuation of Herr Schwatka for Mrs Laure, and when she alluded to a weakness of the heart, he asked:

"Have you anything on your mind that worries you?" She caught her breath for a second, and the doctor read in her hesitancy the true answer, though she replied:

"Oh, no."

"I will leave you a few powders, though a change of scene would do you more good than any medicine I might prescribe. You need to get out and away from accustomed places. You are stagnating. Your mind is travelling in a circle, and your thoughts dwell too much on yourself, which always produces an unsatisfactory mental, as well as physical condition. I sometimes advise my lady patients, when they are the subject of their own thoughts, to think of me. A crusty old bachelor is so radical a change, and so hard a subject that it has succeeded admirably in curing some of them, who only needed variety." This last remark brought a smile to Dainty's face.

"Yet I advise them not to overdo the remedy lest they think too much of me. I am extremely cautious, Mrs Laure."

Dainty smiled again. Sentiment and the doctor seemed so absurd a combination to her. He was kind-hearted, but to think of him as an awakener of love--Ah! love brought to her mind another. She blushed, stopped, and _thought of the doctor_. It was a good remedy. He was looking at her. She felt a mixture of discomfort and a desire to tell him how great was her heartache. Had he asked her her secret, she would have told him. He divined her confidential mood, but asked nothing. It is sometimes wise to be ignorant. If the family physician should divulge the secrets of the inner life of the social sphere in which he moves, what a shattered world would we live in! The life of a hermit would at once hold irresistible charms for many.

What an innocent and ignorant violator of social and marital laws was Dainty! But ignorance and innocence are not as beautiful qualities as knowledge and purity. With the former, life is but drifting; with the latter, it is anchored to a rock.

The doctor realised that Dainty was drifting. He had seen many another woman drift, only to be broken against the rocks on bleak unknown shores; later he had seen the wreck washed up lying on the sands of life, exposed to the gaze of the gaping curiosity-seeker, and to his careless comments. Would this beautiful creature, wounded almost to death, be another wreck noted by pitying angels, and filling a sorrowful page in the book of Time? Not if he could help guide her. Ah! if our impulses are in the direction of the good, we know not how soon we may be given the opportunity to guide a frail bark clear of some threatening rock, into smiling waters, and under summer skies! The doctor's opportunity came sooner than he anticipated.

"I will call in again, Mrs Laure," said he, rising. "I have to see a patient a few hours' ride from here, and on my return, will tell Mr Laure that he must take you to England. I am expecting to go home for a short trip this summer, I need a change, too. One gets rusty living in Africa without a sight of other lands."

He took her little hand in his, gave it a quick, firm, friendly grasp, that seemed to say: "I know all about your trouble. Everything will come out all right." Aloud he said: "You must stop thinking about yourself," and left the house.