her blunder quickly, and at once remembering that the pretty Swedish girl had one morning taken the place of an absent fellow servant, in the rebound from her error, she said quietly:  “You mean Frida!  Certainly! she can look after his room, if he prefers her.”  But for her blunder she might have added conscientiously that she thought the girl would prove inefficient, but she did not.  She remembered the incident of the wood; yet if the girl had a lover in the wood, she could not urge it as a proof of incapacity.  She gave the necessary orders, and the incident passed.

Visiting the patient a few days afterward, she could not help noticing a certain shy gratitude in Mr. Calton’s greeting of her, which she quietly ignored.  This forced the ingenuous Chris to more positive speech.  He dwelt with great simplicity and enthusiasm on the Swedish girl’s gentleness and sympathy.  “You have no idea of—­her—­natural tenderness, Miss Trotter,” he stammered naively.  Miss Trotter, remembering the wood, thought to herself that she had some faint idea of it, but did not impart what it was.  He spoke also of her beauty, not being clever enough to affect an indifference or ignorance of it, which made Miss Trotter respect him and smile an unqualified acquiescence.  Frida certainly was pretty!  But when he spoke of her as “Miss Jansen,” and said she was so much more “ladylike and refined than the other servants,” she replied by asking him if his bandages hurt him, and, receiving a negative answer, graciously withdrew.

Indeed, his bandages gave him little trouble now, and his improvement was so marked and sustained that the doctor was greatly gratified, and, indeed, expressed as much to Miss Trotter, with the conscientious addition that he believed the greater part of it was due to her capable nursing!  “Yes, ma’am, he has to thank you for it, and no one else!”

Miss Trotter raised her dark eyes and looked steadily at him.  Accustomed as he was to men and women, the look strongly held him.  He saw in her eyes an intelligence equal to his own, a knowledge of good and evil, and a toleration and philosophy, equal to his own, but a something else that was as distinct and different as their sex.  And therein lay its charm, for it merely translated itself in his mind that she had very pretty eyes, which he had never noticed before, without any aggressive intellectual quality.  And with this, alas! came the man’s propensity to reason.  It meant of course but one thing; he saw it all now!  If he, in his preoccupation and coolness, had noticed her eyes, so also had the younger and emotional Chris. The young fellow was in love with her!  It was that which had stimulated his recovery, and she was wondering if he, the doctor, had observed it.  He smiled back the superior smile of our sex in moments of great inanity, and poor Miss Trotter believed he understood her.  A few days after this, she noticed that Frida Jansen was wearing a pearl ring and a somewhat ostentatious locket.  She remembered now that Mr. Bilson had told her that the Roanoke Ledge was very rich, and that Calton was likely to prove a profitable guest.  But it was not her business.