Bad Hugh

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.