Louisa had taken them gingerly in her extreme fingertips , carried them across the field to the lawn fence , and cast them over it , under the amused grey eyes of portly Dr. Hamilton , who was looking out of his office window . Then Louisa had come back to the porch door and ostentatiously washed her hands . `` I guess that will settle Donald Hamilton , '' she told the secretly sorry Mary Isabel triumphantly , and it did settle him -- at least as far as any farther social advances were concerned . Dr. Hamilton was an excellent physician and an equally excellent man . Louisa Irving could not have picked a flaw in his history or character . Indeed , against Dr. Hamilton himself she had no grudge , but he was the brother of a man she hated and whose relatives were consequently taboo in Louisa 's eyes . Not that the brother was a bad man either ; he had simply taken the opposite side to the Irvings in a notable church feud of a dozen years ago , and Louisa had never since held any intercourse with him or his fellow sinners . Mary Isabel did not look at the Hamilton house . She kept her head resolutely turned away as she went down the shore lane with its wild sweet loneliness of salt-withered grasses and piping sea-winds . Only when she turned the corner of the fir-wood , which shut her out from view of the houses , did she look timidly over the line-fence . Dr. Hamilton was standing there , where the fence ran out to the sandy shingle , smoking his little black pipe , which he took out and put away when Mary Isabel came around the firs . Men did things like that instinctively in Mary Isabel 's company . There was something so delicately virginal about her , in spite of her forty years , that they gave her the reverence they would have paid to a very young , pure girl . Dr. Hamilton smiled at the little troubled face under the big sunbonnet . Mary Isabel had to wear a sunbonnet . She would never have done it from choice . `` What is the matter ? '' asked the doctor , in his big , breezy , old-bachelor voice . He had another voice for sick-beds and rooms of bereavement , but this one suited best with the purring of the waves and winds . `` How do you know that anything is the matter ? ''
Mary XXXXX parried demurely .
Hamilton Irving Irvings Isabel fir-wood firs sea-winds shingle sick-beds smoking