Vavasour kept his eyes fixed on the zoophyte, and said,—­

“I shall be only too delighted, if you wish it.”

“You will wish it yourself a second time,” chimed in Campbell, “if you try it once.  Perhaps you know nothing of him but professionally.  Unfortunately for professional men, that too often happens.”

“Know anything of him—­I!  I assure you not, save that he attends Mrs. Vavasour and the children,” said Vavasour, looking up at last:  but with an expression of anger which astonished both Valencia and Campbell.

Campbell thought that he was too proud to allow rank as a gentleman to a country doctor; and despised him from that moment, though, as it happened, unjustly.  But he answered quietly,—­

“I assure you, that whatever some country practitioners may be, the average of them, as far as I have seen, are cleverer men, and even of higher tone than their neighbours; and Thurnall is beyond the average:  he is a man of the world,—­even too much of one,—­and a man of science; and I fairly confess that, what with his wit, his savoir vivre, and his genial good temper, I have quite fallen in love with him in a single evening; we began last night on the microscope, and ended on all heaven and earth.”

“How I should like to make a third!”

“My dear Queen Whims would hear a good deal of sober sense, then; at least on one side:  but I shall not ask her:  for Mr. Thurnall and I have our deep secrets together.”

So spoke the Major, in the simple wish to exalt Tom in a quarter where he hoped to get him practice; and his “secret” was a mere jest, unnecessary, perhaps, as he thought afterwards, to pass off Tom’s want of orthodoxy.

“I was a babbler then,” said he to himself the next moment; “how much better to have simply held my tongue!”

“Ah; yes; I know men have their secrets, as well as women,” said Valencia, for the mere love of saying something:  but as she looked at Vavasour, she saw an expression in his face which she had never seen before.  What was it?—­All that one can picture for oneself branded into the countenance of a man unable to repress the least emotion, who had worked himself into the belief that Thurnall had betrayed his secret.

“My dear Mr. Vavasour,” cried Campbell, of course unable to guess the truth, and supposing vaguely that he was ‘ill;’ “I am sure that—­that the sun has overpowered you” (the only possible thing he could think of).  “Lie down on the sofa a minute” (Vavasour was actually reeling with rage and terror), “and I will run up to Thurnall’s for salvolatile.”

Elsley, who thought him the most consummate of hypocrites, cast on him a look which he intended to have been withering, and rushed out of the room, leaving the two staring at each other.

Valencia was half inclined to laugh, knowing Elsley’s petulance and vanity:  but the impossibility of guessing a cause kept her quiet.