But only her parramatty frock was in mourning, for already she had been the doctor's housekeeper for two full months, and her father had not appeared to plague her (he never did appear, it may be told at once), and so how could her face be woeful when her heart leapt with gladness?
Never had prisoner pined for the fields more than this reticent girl to be frank, and she poured out her inmost self to the doctor, so that daily he discovered something beautiful (and exasperating) about womanhood.

And it was his love for her that had changed her.

"You do love me, don't you ?" she would say, and his answer might be "I have told you that fifty times already;" to which she would reply, gleefully, "That is not often, I say it all day to myself." Exasperating?
Yes, that was the word.

Long before summer came, the doctor knew that he had given himself into the hands of a tyrant.

It was idle his saying that this irregularity and that carelessness were habits that had become part of him; she only rocked her arms impatiently, and if he would not stand still to be put to rights, then she would follow him along the street, brushing him as he walked, a sight that was witnessed several times while he was in the mutinous stage.
"Talk about masterfulness," he would say, when she whipped off his coat or made a dart at the mud on his trousers; "you are the most masterful little besom I ever clapped eyes on." But as he said it he perhaps crossed his legs, and she immediately cried, "You have missed two holes in lacing your boots!" Of a morning he would ask her sarcastically to examine him from top to toe and see if he would do, and examine him she did, turning him round, pointing out that he had been sitting "again" on his tails, that oh, oh, he must have cut that buttonhole with his knife.