Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/468

Rh passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender undersized man in shabby clothes, about whose retreating back, as he crossed the street to signal a Station Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out and looked again: yes, the back was certainly like Dr. Wyant’s—but What could Wyant be doing at Hanaford, and in a Westmore car?

Amherst’s ﬁrst impulse was to spring out and overtake him. He kneW how admirably the young physician had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even recalled Dr. Garford’s saying, With his kindly sceptical smile: “Poor Wyant believed to the end that we could save her”—and felt again his own inward movement of thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been worked.

He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to express his sense of the fact by warm words and a liberal fee; but since Bessy’s death he had never returned to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight of the young doctor.

Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to ﬁnd out why he was at Hanaford, and make some proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger were really Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it appear that he was on his way to catch the New York express; and in any case Amherst’s engagements at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible. [ 452 ]