* * * * *

It has cost a good deal of trouble to work the Doctor’s talk up into this formal shape.  Some of his sentences have been rounded off for him, and the whole brought into a more rhetorical form than it could have pretended to, if taken as it fell from his lips.  But the exact course of his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible his expressions have been retained.  Though given in the form of a discourse, it must be remembered that this was a conversation, much more fragmentary and colloquial than it seems as just read.

The Reverend Doctor was very far from taking offence at the old physician’s freedom of speech.  He knew him to be honest, kind, charitable, self-denying, wherever any sorrow was to be alleviated, always reverential, with a cheerful trust in the great Father of all mankind.  To be sure, his senior deacon, old Deacon Shearer,—­who seemed to have got his Scripture-teachings out of the “Vinegar Bible,” (the one where Vineyard is misprinted Vinegar, which a good many people seem to have adopted as the true reading,)—­his senior deacon had called Dr. Kittredge an “infidel.”  But the Reverend Doctor could not help feeling, that, unless the text, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” were an interpolation, the Doctor was the better Christian of the two.  Whatever his senior deacon might think about it, he said to himself that he shouldn’t be surprised if he met the Doctor in heaven yet, inquiring anxiously after old Deacon Shearer.

He was on the point of expressing himself very frankly to the Doctor, with that benevolent smile on his face which had sometimes come near giving offence to the readers of the “Vinegar” edition, but he saw that the physician’s attention had been arrested by Elsie.  He looked in the same direction himself, and could not help being struck by her attitude and expression.  There was something singularly graceful in the curves of her neck and the rest of her figure, but she was so perfectly still that it seemed as if she were hardly breathing.  Her eyes were fixed on the young girl with whom Mr. Bernard was talking.  He had often noticed their brilliancy, but now it seemed to him that they appeared dull, and the look on her features was as of some passion which had missed its stroke.  Mr. Bernard’s companion seemed unconscious that she was the object of this attention, and was listening to the young master as if he had succeeded in making himself very agreeable.

Of course Dick Venner had not mistaken the game that was going on.  The schoolmaster meant to make Elsie jealous,—­and he had done it.  That’s it:  get her savage first, and then come wheedling round her,—­a sure trick, if he isn’t headed off somehow.  But Dick saw well enough that he had better let Elsie alone just now, and thought the best way of killing the evening would be to amuse himself in a little lively talk with Mrs. Blanche Creamer, and incidentally to show Elsie that he could make himself acceptable to other women, if not to herself.