Meantime the doctor sat in his own room nearby, thinking of 'Lina
Worthington, and wishing she were a little more refined.
"Where does she get that coarseness?" he thought. "Not from her mother,
certainly. She seems very gentle and ladylike. It must be from the
Worthingtons," and the doctor wondered where he had heard that name
before, and why it affected him rather unpleasantly, bringing with it
memories of Lily. "Poor Lily," he sighed mentally. "Your love would have
made me a better man if I had not cast it from me. Dear Lily, the mother
of my child," and a tear half trembled in his eyelashes, as he tried to
fancy that child; tried to hear the patter of the little feet running to
welcome him home, as they might have done had he been true to Lily;
tried to hear the baby voice calling him "papa;" to feel the baby hands
upon his face--his bearded face where the great tears were standing now.
"I did love Lily," he murmured; "and had I known of the child I never
could have left her. Oh, Lily, my lost Lily, come back to me, come!" and
his arms were stretched out into empty space, as if he fain would
encircle again the girlish form he had so often held in his embrace.
It was very late ere Dr. Richards slept that night, and the morning
found him pale, haggard and nearly desperate. Thoughts of Lily were
gone, and in their place was a fixed determination to follow on in the
course he had marked out, to find him a rich wife, to cast remorse to
the winds, and be as happy as he could.
How anxious the doctor was to have Alice go; how fearful lest she should
not; and how relieved when asked by 'Lina one night to go with her the
next morning and see Miss Johnson off. There were Mrs. Worthington and
'Lina, Dr. Richards and Irving Stanley, and a dozen more admirers, who,
dazzled with Alice's beauty, were dancing attendance upon her to the
latest moment, but none looked so sorry as Irving Stanley, or said
good-by so unwillingly, and 'Lina, as she saw the wistful gaze he sent
after the receding train, playfully asked him if he did not feel some
like the half of a pair of scissors.
The remark jarred painfully on Irving's finer feelings, while the
doctor, affecting to laugh and ejaculate "pretty good," wished so much
that his black-eyed lady were different in some things.