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 Isabel parried demurely . `` By your face . Come now , tell me what it is . '' `` It is really nothing . I have just been foolish , that is all . I wanted a hat with forget-me-nots and a grey silk , and Louisa says I must have black and a bonnet . '' The doctor looked indignant but held his peace .
He and Mary Isabel had tacitly agreed never XXXXX discuss Louisa , because such discussion would not make for harmony .
By around as at from like of to under with