And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
companionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ should
discover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for a
while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who
when so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waiting
somewhere near.
The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
country doctor, her husband's tried and closest friend, whose children
were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years
_her_ secret had been--the doctor. When she had come as a bride
into that neighborhood, he, her husband's senior by several years, was
already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the
birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had
discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had
dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he
welcomed the wound.
Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from
the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep
alongside her, she could hear the doctor's buggy passing on its way to
some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients
also.
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