His world recognized it, and that was why he
was never known by his name in all the district--he was only admiringly
called "The Young Doctor."
He had never been to Tralee since the Mazarines had arrived, though he
had passed it often and had sometimes seen Louise in the garden with her
dog, her black cat and her bright canary. The combination of the cat and
the canary did not seem incongruous where she was concerned; it was as
though something in her passionless self neutralized even the antagonisms
of natural history. She had made the gloomy black cat and the
light-hearted canary to be friends. Perhaps that came from an everlasting
patience which her life had bred in her; perhaps it was the powerful gift
of one in touch with the remote, primitive things.
The Young Doctor had also seen her in the paddock with the horses,
bare-headed, lithe and so girlishly slim, with none of the unmistakable
if elusive lines belonging to the maturity which marriage brings. He had
taken off his hat to her in the distance, but she had never waved a hand
in reply. She only stood and gazed at him, and her look followed him long
after he passed by. He knew well that in the gaze was nothing of the
interest which a woman feels in a man; it was the look of one chained to
a rock, who sees a Samaritan in the cheerless distance.
In the daily round of her life she was always busy; not restlessly, but
constantly, and always silently, busy.
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