over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed,
long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
covered by a thick dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the
hedge: "How's your child, Amy?"

I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but
as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the
squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at
the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct catch in
her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.

"He's well, thank you."

We trotted again. "A young patient of yours," I said; and the doctor,
flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, "Her husband used to be."

"She seems a dull creature," I remarked listlessly.

"Precisely," said Kennedy. "She is very passive. It's enough to look
at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow,
prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind--an inertness
that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises
of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you
see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the daughter
of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd;
the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with
the cook of his widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who
passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter
threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to
serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of