The sudden change in Doctor Bruck’s career was still a nine-days’ wonder. Many could hardly yet believe that the calumniated and depreciated young physician of a few weeks since now walked the streets of the capital an actual Hofrath. The man grew daily in the estimation of court and public; and, since his removal to L—— would in future make him unattainable, every sufferer was desirous of benefiting by his skill. Thus it happened that Doctor Bruck was actually overwhelmed with patients. His manuscript lay untouched upon his writing-table; he slept in his lodgings in town, taking his meals there usually, and thus declining to avail himself of the councillor’s daily invitations to dine; any time spent at the villa or with his aunt had to be stolen, as he expressed it, from his patients.
Kitty saw him but seldom, and was all the more struck with the great change in him, probably in consequence of hard work, she thought. He looked pale and wearied; his former quiet but gentle reserve had become gloomy taciturnity. With Kitty he had scarcely interchanged two words since she had surprised his tête-à-tête with Flora in the hall, and his curt manner towards her had been such as to convince her that her inopportune appearance on that occasion had greatly angered him. It wounded her that it should be so, and she avoided him whenever she could.
In his conduct towards Flora, on the other hand, there was not the slightest change; he was the same grave, dignified person whom Kitty had seen the first time she had seen the betrothed pair together. Sometimes she half believed that the terrible scene by Henriette’s bedside was either a freak of her own imagination, or else that Doctor Bruck possessed a power, common to no other mortal, of forgetting, of absolutely obliterating from his memory, disagreeable occurrences. Flora had evidently expected that her entreaty for forgiveness, her manifest repentance, would restore the intimate intercourse of the first weeks of their betrothal. Loving her so passionately as he did, must he not be intensely happy in knowing her now irrevocably his own again? Perhaps the happiness was there, only concealed for the present, and his beautiful betrothed might console herself by reflecting that a man of Bruck’s stamp was not too easily appeased, that all would be as she would have it by September, the month now fixed for the marriage.