There was one person to whom the shameful confession of his marriage must be made—­Miss Muller.  That was the result, he thought, of his absurd whim of loitering about Berry town.  When he had met Maria Muller before, he had no reason to think she cared a doit whether he was married or single.  Now—­McCall’s color changed, alone as he was, with shame and annoyance.  With all his experience of life and of women, he had as little self-confidence as an awkward girl.  But Maria had left him no room for doubt.

“It would be the right thing to do.  I ought to tell her.  But it will be a slight matter to her, no doubt.”

If he had been a single man, in all probability he would have asked Maria Muller to marry him that day.  He was a susceptible fellow, with a man’s ordinary vanity and passions; and Maria’s bright sweet face, their loiterings along shady lanes and under Bourbon roses, the perpetual deference she paid to his stupendous intellect, had had due effect.  He was not the man to see a strong, beautiful woman turn pale and tremble at his touch, and preserve his phlegm.

He threw away his cigar, and jumped the fence into the Water-cure grounds.  “I’ll tell her now, and then be off from old Berry town for ever.”

Miss Muller was standing in the porch.  She leaned over the railing, looking at the ragged rain-clouds driven swiftly over the blue distance, and at the wet cornfields and clumps of bay bushes gray with berries which filled the damp air with their pungent smell.  Her dog, a little black-and-tan terrier, bit at her skirt.  She had just been lecturing to her three students on the vertebrae, and when she took him up could not help fumbling over his bones, even while she perceived the color and scent of the morning.  They gave her so keen a pleasure that the tears rushed to her eyes, and she stopped punching Hero’s back.

“‘The rain is over and gone,’” she recited softly to herself, “’the vines with the tender grape give a good smell, and the time of the singing of birds has come.’  There is no poetry like that old Hebrew love-song.  If only it had not been hackneyed by being turned into a theological allegory!  Ha, doggy, doggy!  There comes a friend of ours!” suddenly laughing and hugging him as she caught sight of a large man coming up the road with a swinging gait and loose white overcoat.  She broke off a rose and put it in her breast, tied on her hat and hurried down to meet him, the Song of Solomon still keeping time with her thoughts in a lofty cadence:  “’Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning upon his beloved?  Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm.  For love is strong as death.’”

“What’s that, Maria?  I heard you intoning as I came up the hill?” Her eyes were soft and luminous and her voice unsteady.  I am afraid Doctor McCall’s eyes were warmer in their admiration than they should have been under the circumstances.  Why should she not tell him?  She repeated it.  She had been chattering for two hours on cervical, dorsal and lumbar vertebrae, without stopping to take breath.  But she grew red now and broke down miserably.