‘Maybe you do not understand me, sir,’ she said, a little eager to be understood, and pouring out confidences in a way as rare with her as it was complimentary to her hearer.  ’I am not complaining of anybody.  I know Mr. Falkirk is very fond of me—­but he likes to keep me off at a respectful distance.  Only a few nights ago, I was feeling particularly good, for me, and rather lonely, and I just asked him to kiss me for good night—­ and it made him so glum that he has hardly opened his lips to me ever since!’ said Wych Hazel in an aggrieved voice.

‘Perhaps Mr. Falkirk has something upon his mind, my dear!’ said Dr. Maryland, with raised eyebrows and an uncommon expression of fun playing about the lines of his mouth.  ’It is not always safe to conclude that coincident facts have a relation of cause and effect.’

‘No—­’ said the girl, ’I suppose not.  But I stood there all by myself and heard him turn the keys and rattle the bolts—­and then I ran upstairs to find Mrs. Bywank,—­and of course she couldn’t speak for a toothache.  And then I felt as if there was nobody in all the world—­in all my world—­but me!’

Dr. Maryland looked tenderly upon the young girl beside him, yet uncomprehendingly.  Probably his peculiar masculine nature furnished him with no clue to her essentially feminine views of things.

‘I dare say, my dear,’ he said,—­’I dare say!  The best cure for such a state of feeling hat I know, would be to begin living for other people.  You will find the world grow populous very soon.  And one other cure,’—­he added, his eye going away from Wych Hazel into an abstracted gaze towards the outer world;—­ ’when you can say, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” ’

The little hand upon his shoulder stirred,—­was lifted, and laid down again.  Somehow she comprehended him better than he did her.  Then with a sudden motion Hazel took off a luminous bracelet—­one of the three she always wore, and laid it across Dr. Maryland’s hand.

‘Did mamma ever shew you that, sir?’ she said.  ’She had it made just for me.  And then my wrist was so small that it would go twice round.’

It was a string of twelve stones, all different, all cut and set alike; each long parallelogram fitting rather closely to the next on either side; the hues—­opaque, translucent, clouded—­flashed and gleamed with every imaginable variation of colour and shade.  The doctor looked at it in silence.  Then spoke.

’What did she mean by it, Hazel, my dear?  I do not catch the interpretation.’

She turned it a little in his hand, until the light fell on the gold framing beneath the gems, and Dr. Maryland could read the fine graven tracery:—­“The first, a jasper.”

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed with new interest, ‘I see.’  And he took up the chain of stones and turned it over and over, rather passed it through his fingers like a rosary, studying the stones and murmuring the names of them.