First, then--and the strength of two-thirds of the strands lay
there--was my mother. I could never remember the time when she had not
been delicate and ailing, even when I was a rough school-boy at
Elizabeth College. It was that infirmity of the body which occasionally
betrays the wounds of a soul. I did not comprehend it while I was a boy;
then it was headache only. As I grew older I discovered that it was
heartache. The gnawing of a perpetual disappointment, worse than a
sudden and violent calamity, had slowly eaten away the very foundation
of healthy life. No hand could administer any medicine for this disease
except mine, and, as soon as I was sure of that, I felt what my first
duty was.

I knew where the blame of this lay, if any blame there were. I had found
it out years ago by my mother's silence, her white cheeks, and her
feeble tone of health. My father was never openly unkind or careless,
but there was always visible in his manner a weariness of her, an utter
disregard for her feelings. He continued to like young and pretty women,
just as he had liked her because she was young and pretty. He remained
at the very point he was at when they began their married life. There
was nothing patently criminal in it, God forbid!--nothing to create an
open and a grave scandal on our little island. But it told upon my
mother; it was the one drop of water falling day by day. "A continual
dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike," says
the book of Proverbs. My father's small infidelities were much the same
to my mother. She was thrown altogether upon me for sympathy, and
support, and love.

When I first fathomed this mystery, my heart rose in very undutiful
bitterness against Dr. Dobrée; but by-and-by I found that it resulted
less from a want of fidelity to her than from a radical infirmity in his