

E-text prepared by Joyce McDonald, Christine Bell, and Marc D'Hooghe
(http:www.girlebooks.com & http://www.freeliterature.org)



THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

A Novel

By the Author of
"Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd"
Etc. Etc. Etc.







London
John and Robert Maxwell
Milton House, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street



CONTENTS.

    I. A young man from the country
    II. A sensation author
    III. Isabel
    IV. The end of George Gilbert's holiday
    V. George at home
    VI. Too much alone
    VII. On the bridge
    VIII. About poor Joe Tillet's young wife
    IX. Miss Sleaford's engagement
    X. A bad beginning
    XI. "She only said,'my life is weary!'"
    XII. Something like a birthday
    XIII. "Oh, my cousin, shallow-hearted!"
    XIV. Under Lord Thurston's oak
    XV. Roland says, "Amen"
    XVI. Mr. Lansdell relates an adventure
    XVII. The first warning
    XVIII. The second warning
    XIX. What might have been!
    XX. "Oceans should divide us!"
    XXI. "Once more the gate behind me falls"
    XXII. "My love's a noble madness"
    XXIII. A little cloud
    XXIV. Lady Gwendoline does her duty
    XXV. "For love himself took part against himself"
    XXVI. A popular preacher
    XXVII. "And now I live, and now my life is done!"
    XXVIII. Trying to be good.
    XXIX. The first whisper of the storm
    XXX. The beginning of a great change
    XXXI. Fifty pounds
    XXXII. "I'll not believe but Desdemona's honest"
    XXXIII. Keeping a promise
    XXXIV. Retrospective
    XXXV. "'Twere best at once to sink to peace"
    XXXVI. Between two worlds
    XXXVII. "If any calm, a calm despair"




THE DOCTORS WIFE.




CHAPTER I.

A YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY


There were two surgeons in the little town of
Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire,--Mr.
Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of
the queer old High Street; and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who
lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very
hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. Pawlkatt
derived from his aristocratic patients.

John Gilbert was an elderly man, with a young son. He had married late
in life, and his wife had died very soon after the birth of this son. It
was for this reason, most likely, that the surgeon loved his child as
children are rarely loved by their fathers--with an earnest,
over-anxious devotion, which from the very first had been something
womanly in its character, and which grew with the child's growth. Mr.
Gilbert's mind was narrowed by the circle in which he lived. He had
inherited his own patients and the parish patients from his father, who
had been a surgeon before him, and who had lived in the same house, with
the same red lamp over the little old-fashioned surgery-door, for
eight-and-forty years, and had died, leaving the house, the practice,
and the red lamp to his son.

If John Gilbert's only child had possessed the capacity of a Newton or
the aspirations of a Napoleon, the surgeon would nevertheless have shut
him up in the surgery to compound aloes and conserve of roses, tincture
of rhubarb and essence of peppermint. Luckily for the boy, he was only a
common-place lad, with a good-looking, rosy face; clear grey eyes, which
stared at you frankly; and a thick stubble of brown hair, parted in the
middle and waving from the roots. He was tall, straight, and muscular; a
good runner, a first-rate cricketer, tolerably skilful with a pair of
boxing-gloves or single-sticks, and a decent shot. He wrote a fair
business-like hand, was an excellent arithmetician, remembered a
smattering of Latin, a random line here and there from those Roman
poets and philosophers whose writings had been his torment at a certain
classical and commercial academy at Wareham. He spoke and wrote
tolerable English,