CHAPTER XVIII.

"THE HEARTBREAK OF TO-MORROW."

A few days after, as soon as Dr. James could make up his mind to do so, he called on Miss Spelman, and found the house quite as forlorn as he had expected, and his old friend very glad to receive sympathy. She said she had heard from her niece that very day.

"It was an amusing, affectionate letter," said Miss Selina, "just like her. Poor child! she will be easy now she is with her friend. She was very much changed, doctor."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, she had grown so quiet and so strange--that is, she seemed to me strange; she would sit so long without speaking a word; and then she was much more affectionate--I mean more demonstrative--than when she first came; but she seemed to have lost her good spirits."

"I thought she seemed much as usual whenever I saw her."

"Yes, she was gayer than ever when any one was here; but that was only put on. Poor child! she felt Jessie's marriage, and that she was so soon to be separated from the friend of her childhood."

Miss Spelman seemed to think the doctor needed consolation, and from little remarks and insinuations, he imagined that she considered him suffering from disappointment; he did not try to undeceive her, for was it not true?

He found Martha Burney a great comfort; to her he sometimes talked of Margaret, and from her he learned to understand things in her character which had been puzzling to him before. And the more he became convinced that Margaret had spoken the truth in saying that she loved him, the more he wondered at and admired her for so completely concealing it from him in their intercourse; and the better he understood that her apparent levity and exaggerated spirits were no doubt assumed in order to hide her deeper feelings. He thought much of all these things, and wondered more; but he kept his secret and hers, and only suspected sometimes that Miss Burney knew more than any one else about the matter.

Dr. James was a disappointed man, and he made no effort to disguise it from himself; but he was not a man to sit down in despair and waste his life in regrets. So, recognizing the fact that he had thrown away a great chance of happiness, and been wholly to blame for it, he resolutely turned the energy of his thoughts into other channels, and worked harder than ever. But Sealing became unutterably wearisome to him; it was only by iron determination that he went through with his daily round of duties, and as for society, he confined himself exclusively to making the calls that he imposed on himself, and going for relaxation to Father Barry and Miss Burney.

In the middle of August he left Richards in charge, and went for a week to his mother and sisters in Maine.