But day upon day, week upon week, passed away, and though among the families I visited there were many young ladies who possessed more than the qualifications with which I conceived that I should be amply contented, and by whom I might flatter myself that my proposals would not be disdained, I saw not one to whose lifelong companionship I should not infinitely have preferred the solitude I found so irksome.
One evening, in returning home from visiting a poor female patient whom I attended gratuitously, and whose case demanded more thought than that of any other in my list,--for though it had been considered hopeless in the hospital, and she had come home to die, I felt certain that I could save her, and she seemed recovering under my care,--one evening--it was the fifteenth of May--I found myself just before the gates of the house that had been inhabited by Dr.Lloyd.Since his death the house had been unoccupied; the rent asked for it by the proprietor was considered high; and from the sacred Hill on which it was situated, shyness or pride banished the wealthier traders.

The garden gates stood wide open, as they had stood on the winter night on which I had passed through them to the chamber of death.

The remembrance of that deathbed came vividly before me, and the dying man's fantastic threat rang again in my startled ears.

An irresistible impulse, which I could not then account for, and which I cannot account for now,--an impulse the reverse of that which usually makes us turn away with quickened step from a spot that recalls associations of pain,--urged me on through the open gates up the neglected grass-grown road, urged me to look, under the weltering sun of the joyous spring, at that house which I bad never seen but in the gloom of a winter night, under the melancholy moon.

As the building came in sight, with dark-red bricks, partially overgrown with ivy, I perceived that it was no longer unoccupied.