‘Heaven help poor Peg!’ he ejaculated; ’for she will soon have all those children on her hands.  Mrs. Marshall cannot last long.  Well, Miss Garston, how many hours do you intend to spend at the cottage daily?’

’I should think two hours in the morning and an hour and a half in the late afternoon or evening might do, unless there be a change for the worse, or Elspeth falls ill; she is very old and feeble.’

’She was half starved, poor old creature,—­fairly clemmed, as they say in the North.  Here we are at your place, Miss Garston.  How bright and inviting your parlour looks!  I wonder if I may ask to come in for a few minutes, while I tell you about the other case?’

Of course I could not do less than invite him to enter, after that; but I am afraid my manner lacked enthusiasm, and betrayed the fact that I was unwilling to entertain Mr. Hamilton as a guest, for when I saw his face in the lamplight he was regarding me with some amusement.

‘Cunliffe has done me no end of mischief,’ he said, as he offered to relieve me of my wraps:  ’that unfortunate speech has strongly prejudiced you against me.  Confess, now, you think me a very disagreeable person, because I happened to disagree with you that evening.’

‘Certainly not on that account,’ I returned, falling into the trap; and then we both laughed, for I had as good as owned that I thought him disagreeable.  That laugh made us better friends.  I felt I no longer disliked him:  it was certainly not his fault that Providence had given him that type of face, and I supposed one could get used to it.

‘I was in an evil mood that afternoon,’ he went on, and then I knew instinctively that he wanted to efface his satirical words from my memory.  ’Things had gone wrong somehow,—­for this world of ours is a mighty muddle sometimes.’  And here he gave an impatient sigh.  ’It is a relief to human nature to vent one’s spleen on the first handy person that crosses one’s path, and, pardon me for saying so, you were just a little aggressive yourself,’ looking at me rather dubiously, as though he were not quite sure how I should take this hit.  My conscience told me that I had been far from peaceable; on the contrary, I had been decidedly cross; not that I would confess that this was the case, so I only returned mildly that I considered that he had been hard on me that day, and had handled my pet theory very roughly.

’Come, now you are talking like a reasonable woman, and I will plead guilty to some severity.  Let me own that I distrusted you, Miss Garston.  I have a horror of gush, and what I call the working mania of young ladies, and you had not proved to me then that you could work.  At the present day, if a girl is restless and bad-tempered, and cannot get on with her own people, she takes up hospital-nursing, and a rare muddle she makes of it sometimes.  I own hospital work is better than the convent of the Middle Ages, where the troublesome young ladies were safely immured; but, as I said before, I distrust the hysterical restlessness of the age.’