“How do I know, Jeff?” was Miss Susy’s answer.  Then, after a pause,—­“Elsie made him come, I guess.  Go ask Dr. Kittredge; he knows all about ’em both, they say.”

Dr. Kittredge, the leading physician of Rockland, was a shrewd old man, who looked pretty keenly into his patients through his spectacles, and pretty widely at men, women, and things in general over them.  Sixty-three years old,—­just the year of the grand climacteric.  A bald crown, as every doctor should have.  A consulting practitioner’s mouth; that is, movable round the corners while the case is under examination, but both corners well drawn down and kept so when the final opinion is made up.  In fact, the Doctor was often sent for to act as “caounsel,” all over the county, and beyond it.  He kept three or four horses, sometimes riding in the saddle, commonly driving in a sulky, pretty fast, and looking straight before him, so that people got out of the way of bowing to him as he passed on the road.  There was some talk about his not being so long-sighted as other folks, but his old patients laughed and looked knowing when this was spoken of.

The Doctor knew a good many things besides how to drop tinctures and shake out powders.  Thus, he knew a horse, and, what is harder to understand, a horse-dealer, and was a match for him.  He knew what a nervous woman is, and how to manage her.  He could tell at a glance when she is in that condition of unstable equilibrium in which a rough word is like a blow to her, and the touch of unmagnetized fingers reverses all her nervous currents.  It is not everybody that enters into the soul of Mozart’s or Beethoven’s harmonies; and there are vital symphonies in B flat, and other low, sad keys, which a doctor may know as little of as a hurdy-gurdy player of the essence of those divine musical mysteries.  The Doctor knew the difference between what men say and what they mean as well as most people.  When he was listening to common talk, he was in the habit of looking over his spectacles; if he lifted his head so as to look through them at the person talking, he was busier with that person’s thoughts than with his words.

Jefferson Buck was not bold enough to confront the Doctor with Miss Susy’s question, for he did not look as if he were in the mood to answer queries put by curious young people.  His eyes were fixed steadily on the dark girl, every movement of whom he seemed to follow.

She was, indeed, an apparition of wild beauty, so unlike the girls about her that it seemed nothing more than natural, that, when she moved, the groups should part to let her pass through them, and that she should carry the centre of all looks and thoughts with her.  She was dressed to please her own fancy, evidently, with small regard to the modes declared correct by the Rockland milliners and mantua-makers.  Her heavy black hair lay in a braided coil, with a long gold pin shat through it like a javelin.