The year wore on. Alec grew confident. They returned together to their
old quarters. Alec passed his examinations triumphantly, and continued
his studies with greater vigour than before. Especially he walked the
hospitals with much attention and interest, ever warned by Cupples to
beware lest he should come to regard a man as a physical machine, and
so grow a mere doctoring machine himself.
Mr Fraser declined seeing him. The old man was in a pitiable condition,
and indeed never lectured again.
Alec no more frequented his old dismal haunt by the seashore. The cry
of the drowning girl would not have come to him as it would to the more
finely nervous constitution of Mr Cupples; but the cry of a sea-gull,
or the wash of the waves, or even the wind across the tops of the
sand-hills, would have been enough to make him see in every crest which
the wind tore white in the gloamin, the forlorn figure of the girl he
loved vanishing from his eyes.
The more heartily he worked the more did the evil as well as the
painful portions of his history recede into the background of his
memory, growing more and more like the traces left by a bad, turbid,
and sorrowful dream.
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