She did not raise her eyes from her work this time.  Faber saw that she was distressed if not hurt, and that her soul had closed its lips to him.  He sprang to his feet, and stood bending before her.

“Miss Meredith,” he said, “forgive me.  I have offended you.”

“You have not offended me,” she said quietly.

“Hurt you then, which is worse.”

“How should I have got through,” she said, as if to herself, and dropped her hands with her work on her knees, “if I had not believed there was One caring for me all the time, even when I was most alone!”

“Do you never lose that faith?” asked the doctor.

“Yes; many and many a time.  But it always comes back.”

“Comes and goes with your health.”

“No—­is strongest sometimes when I am furthest from well.”

“When you are most feverish,” said the doctor.  “What a fool I am to go on contradicting her!” he added to himself.

“I think I know you better than you imagine, Mr. Faber,” said Miss Meredith, after just a moment’s pause.  “You are one of those men who like to represent themselves worse than they are.  I at least am bound to think better of you than you would have me.  One who lives as you do for other people, can not be so far from the truth as your words.”

Faber honestly repudiated the praise, for he felt it more than he deserved.  He did try to do well by his neighbor, but was aware of no such devotion as it implied.  Of late he had found his work bore him not a little—­especially when riding away from Owlkirk.  The praise, notwithstanding, sounded sweet from her lips, was sweeter still from her eyes, and from the warmer white of her cheek, which had begun to resume its soft roundness.

“Ah!” thought the doctor, as he rode slowly home, “were it not for sickness, age, and death, this world of ours would be no bad place to live in.  Surely mine is the most needful and the noblest of callings!—­to fight for youth, and health, and love; against age, and sickness, and decay! to fight death to the last, even knowing he must have the best of it in the end! to set law against law, and do what poor thing may be done to reconcile the inexorable with the desirable!  Who knows—­if law be blind, and I am a man that can see—­for at the last, and only at the last do eyes come in the head of Nature—­who knows but I may find out amongst the blind laws to which I am the eyes, that blind law which lies nearest the root of life!—­Ah, what a dreamer I should have been, had I lived in the time when great dreams were possible!  Beyond a doubt I should have sat brooding over the elixir of life, cooking and mixing, heating and cooling, watching for the flash in the goblet.  We know so much now, that the range of hope is sadly limited!  A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are now closed to us, because there the light now shines, and shows naught but despair.  Yet why should the thing be absurd?  Can any one tell why