Dr. Rane made no rejoinder, possibly not having sufficient excuse for his carelessness. He stood looking dreamily from a corner of the window. Phillis, as might be seen from there, was carrying away the fowl prepared for his dinner, and a tureen of sauce. Mrs. Cumberland probably thought he was watching with critical curiosity the movements of his handmaid. She resumed:
"They say, Oliver, there has been no hope of him from the first."
"There was very little. Of course, as it turns out, there could have been none."
"And who wrote the letter? With what motive was it written?" proceeded Mrs. Cumberland, her grey face bent slightly forward, as she waited for an answer.
"It is of no use to ask me, mother. Some people hold one opinion, some another; mine would go for little."
"They are beginning now to think that it was not written at all to injure Edmund, but Mr. Alexander."
"Who told you that?" he asked, a sharper accent discernible in his tone.
"Captain Bohun. He came in this morning to tell me of the death. Considering that I have no claim upon him, that a year ago I had never spoken to him, I must say that Arthur Bohun is very kind and attentive to me. He is one in a thousand."
Perhaps the temptation to say, "It's not for your sake he is so attentive," momentarily assailed Oliver Rane. But he was good-natured in the main, and he knew when to be silent, and when to speak: no man better. Besides, it was no business of his.
"I entertain a different opinion," he observed, referring to the point in discussion. "Of course it is all guess work as to the writer's motive: there can be no profit in discussing it, mother: and I must be going, for my dinner's waiting. Thank you for sending me the chicken."
"A moment yet, Oliver," she interposed, as he was moving away. "Have you heard that Alexander is going to leave?"
"Yes: he was talking to me about it this morning."
If ever a glow of light had been seen lately on Mrs. Cumberland's marble face, it was seen then. The tightly-drawn features had lost their grey tinge.
"Oliver, I could go down on my knees and thank Heaven for it. You don't know how grieved I have felt all through these past two years, to see you put into the shade by that man, and to know that it was I who had brought you here! It will be all right now. New houses are to be built, they say, at the other end of the Ham, and the practice will be worth a great deal. I shall sleep well to-night."
He smiled as he shook hands with her; partly in affection, partly at her unusual vehemence. In passing the drawing-room, Ellen Adair happened to be coming out of it, but he went on. She supposed he had not observed her, and spoke.
"Ah! how do you do, Miss Adair?" he said, turning back, and offering his hand. "Forgive my haste; I am busy to-day."
And before she had time to make any reply, he was gone; leaving an impression on her mind, she could not well have told why or wherefore, that he was ill at ease; that he had hastened away, not from pressure of work, but because he did not care to talk to her.
If that feeling was possessing Dr. Rane, and had reference to the world in general, and not to the young lady in particular, it might not have been agreeable to him to encounter an acquaintance as he turned out of his mother's house. Mr. Alexander was swiftly passing on his way towards home from the lower part of the Ham, and stopped.
"I wish I had never said a syllable about going away until I was off," cried he in his off-hand manner--a pleasanter and more sociable manner than Dr. Rane's. "The news has been noised abroad, and the whole place is upon me; asking this, that, and the other. One man comes and wants to know if I'll sell my furniture; another thinks he'd like the house as it stands. My patients are up in arms;--say I'm doing it to kill them. I shall have some of them in a fever before the day's over."
"Perhaps you won't go, after all," observed Dr. Rane.
"Not go! How can I help going? I'm elected to the post. Why, it's what I've been looking out for ever so long--almost ever since I came here. No, no, Rane: a short time, and Dallory Ham will have seen the last of me."
He hastened across the road to his house, like a man who has the world's work on his busy shoulders. Dr. Rane's thoughts, as he glanced after him, reverted to the mental argument he had held in his chamber, and he unconsciously resumed it, putting himself in the place of the unknown, unhappy writer, as before.
"It's almost keener than the death itself--if the motive was to injure Alexander in his profession, or drive him from the place--to know that he, or she--Mrs. North--might have spared her pains! Heavens! what remorse it must be!--to commit a crime, and then find there was no necessity for doing it!"
Dr. Rane passed his white handkerchief over his brow--the day was very warm--and turned into his house. Phillis once more placed the dinner on the table, and he sat down to it.
But not a mouthful could he swallow; his throat felt like so much dried-chip, and the food would not go down. Phillis, who was coming in for something or other, saw him leave his plate and rise from table.
"Is the fowl not tender, sir?"
"Tender?" he responded, as though the sense of the question had not reached him, and paused. "Oh, it's tender enough: but I must go off to a patient. Get your own dinner, Phillis."
"Surely you'll come back to yours, sir?"
"I've had as much as I want. Take the things away."
"I wonder what's come to him?" mused the woman as his quick steps receded from the house, and she was left with the rejected dishes. A consciousness came dimly penetrating to her hazy brain that there was some change upon him. What it was, or where it lay, she did not define. It was unusual for his strong firm fingers to drop a glass; it was still more unusual for him to explain cause and effect. "The jar slipped from my fingers." "I've had as much as I want. I must go off to a patient." It was quite out of the order of routine for Dr. Rane to be explanatory to his servant on any subject whatever: and perhaps it was his having been so in these two instances that impressed Phillis.
"How quick he must have eaten his dinner!"
Phillis nearly dropped the dish. The words were spoken close behind her, and she had believed herself alone in the house. Turning, she saw Jelly, standing half in, half out of the window.
"Well, I'm sure!" cried Phillis, in wrath. "You needn't come startling a body in that way, Mrs. Jelly. How did you know but the doctor might be at table?"
"I've just seen him go down the lane," returned Jelly, who had plenty of time for gossiping with her neighbours, and had come strolling over the fence now with no other object. "Has he had his dinner? It's but the other minute he was in at our house."
"He has had as much as he means to have," answered Phillis, her anger evaporating, for she liked a gossip also. "I'm sure it's not worth the trouble of serving meals, if they are to be left in this fashion. It was the same thing at breakfast."
Jelly recollected the scene at breakfast; the startled pallor on Dr. Rane's face, when told that Edmund North was dead: she supposed that had spoiled his appetite. Her inquisitive eyes turned unceremoniously to the fowl, and she saw that the merest slice off the wing was alone eaten.
"Perhaps he is not well to-day," said Jelly.
"I don't know about his being well; he's odder than I ever saw him," answered Phillis. "I shouldn't wonder but he has had his stomach turned over them two half-drowned men."
She carried the dinner-things across to the kitchen. Jelly, who assisted at the ceremony, as far as watching and talking went, was standing in the passage, when her quick eyes caught sight of two small pieces of glass. She stooped to pick them up.
"Look, Phillis! You have been breaking something. It's uncommonly