The story he had heard on the occasion of his second visit to Cherry Orchard haunted Anstice for days. There was something so incongruous in the notion of this woman having served a sentence of imprisonment for an offence which, of all others, might well be supposed the most impossible for any decent person to commit; yet Anstice knew instinctively that Mrs. Carstairs had spoken the truth; and although for the last few years he had been far too much occupied with his own private grudge against Fate to spare any pity for the woes of others, he did feel a surprising sympathy for the young and apparently lonely woman whom the world had treated so cruelly.
That she was innocent of the crime with which she was charged, Anstice never doubted. Since the catastrophe which had altered his whole outlook on life, he had been inclined to be cynical regarding the good faith of mankind in general; but Mrs. Carstairs' manner had carried conviction by its very lack of emphasis. She had not protested her innocence--indeed, he could barely remember in what words she had given him to understand that she was not guilty of the loathsome deed; yet her very quietness, the very indifference of her manner as she told her story carried more weight than an avalanche of protestation would have done.
As a medical man Anstice was something of a student of physiognomy; and although Mrs. Carstairs' face was not one to be easily read, the shape of her brow and the classical outline of her features seemed to Anstice to preclude any possibility of the morbid and degenerate taint which must have inspired the communications of whose authorship she had been accused.
The very fact that she did not appear to care whether or no he believed in her strengthened Anstice's belief that she was an innocent and much-wronged woman; and in his mind he linked her with himself as one of the victims of an unfavourable and ruthless destiny.
After attending her for a week Anstice declared her to be in no further need of his services; and she acquiesced with the same air of half-weary graciousness with which she had welcomed his visits.
He noticed that she was rarely to be seen in the village or small town of Littlefield. Occasionally she would pass him on the road in a beautiful motor with which he supposed her husband to have endowed her, and at these times she had generally her small daughter, wrapped in furs, on the seat beside her.
Anstice's introduction to the latter took place about a fortnight after his last visit to Cherry Orchard in a professional capacity. It chanced that he was interested in a small Convalescent Home for Children which had recently been opened in the neighbourhood, and on one or two days had cut short his visit to Mrs. Carstairs on the grounds that his presence was required at the Home. Rather to his disappointment Mrs. Carstairs had not evinced the slightest interest in the scheme, and his surprise was proportionately great when, on one fine spring morning, he received a large bunch of beautiful daffodils from Cherry Orchard, with a rather carelessly worded request that he would give them to the Home if they were likely to be welcome there.