Fortune's Mistress by Mary Chase Comstock

the doctor gently rotated the injured ankle. “How long until I am mended, do you think?”
    “ That depends on you as much as nature,” Venables told him. “If you rest and allow healing, as little as two weeks. Otherwise, a good deal longer. No bones have been broken, but the muscles and tendons have suffered a good deal. You must stay off it at all accounts. Is there someone you can call upon to assist you in your duties here?”
    “ I suppose,” the reverend said thoughtfully, “I might request Reverend Burne in Plymouth to send his curate to me. But then I should have to suffer his company— he talks when he should listen. I had rather bear the pain, if you must know.”
    The doctor nodded. “Have you a cane?”
    “ There are several from Uncle Erasmus’s time,” Mrs. Waller said. Then she laughed. “How ironic, Enos, that it should come to this so soon!”
    “ It is my punishment,” he said ruefully, “for my foolish mockery as a youth.”
    Venables looked at him quizzically.
    “Yes,” his wife explained, “however serious he now seems, Enos was once quite a scamp. Had you told me as a child I would end by marrying my cousin, I should have called you a base liar! He was ever imitating his elders, when the opportunity arose. Uncle Erasmus caught him at it once, hobbling about on a cane and quoting dire passages from Scripture.”
    “ What’s more, I was using one of those selfsame canes which I must now use to good purpose! Perhaps,” he went on thoughtfully, “I might use this mischance as an illustration in my next sermon. What think you, doctor? No sin, however small, goes unpunished?”
    Venables began to wrap the reverend ’s ankle slowly, and it was a moment before he answered. “That depends,” he said at last, “on how you wish your parishioners to view the Almighty— a merciful father or a heartless judge.”
    “ Yes, that thorny problem again—will it be Old Testament or New?”
    When Mrs. Waller escorted Venables to the door after he had finished with her husband, she asked, “How did you find Mrs. Glencoe this afternoon?”
    Although he was good friends with both the reverend and hi s wife, something— perhaps a superstitious fear of losing the happiness he seemed to have discovered— made him reluctant to reveal his interest in the widow. “It is as she said yesterday,” he replied briefly. “She does well enough.”
    Mrs. Waller nodded. “I do not mean to pry, of course, but I have been a little worried about her.”
    “ It is little wonder you should be—a lady alone, facing the birth of a child.”
    “ It is not,” she went on slowly, “her . . . condition so much that prompts my concern. It is her spirit. Oh, I know you will say, well, she is after all a recent widow, but I fear that has little to do with the . . . well, for want of a better word, the darkness I have sensed about her.”
    So he was not alone in his assessment. He said nothing, though, and merely nodded for Mrs. Waller to proceed.
    “In some ways, I have been where she is,” she said softly. “I have not confided this in many, but once— before I married Enos — I was engaged to another man whom I loved very much. He died.”
    The doctor put a hand on her shoulder. She shook her head. “I did my best to recover, but it would not do. I was grateful when my cousin offered for me, and we have built a pleasant life together, but I have never expunged my grief— merely assimilated it into the rest of my life, like poor Annie with her crooked leg. I go about living, doing what I must, even laughing when I may, but I am still aware of his absence. With Mrs. Glencoe, though, it is different.”
    Venables frowned . “How do you mean?”
    She took a moment before proceeding, choos ing her words carefully. “It is as if . . . as if her heart has never sung. Only the mention of her baby brings joy to her eyes, and then it is guarded, as if this treasure, too, might be snatched away.”
    They passed