‘You really don’t know?’

’I only know that you are pleased, and that your anxieties seem to be relieved.’

‘Why, he saved her from being burned, and the brave,’ said Mrs. Nicholson, ‘deserve the fair, not that she is a beauty.’

‘Do tell me all that happened.’

’And tell you I can, for that precious young man took me into his confidence.  First, when I heard that he had come to the Perch, I trampled about the damp riverside with Barbara, and sure enough they met, he being on the Perch’s side of the fence, and Barbara’s line being caught high up in a tree on ours, as often happens.  Well, I asked him to come over the fence and help her to get her line clear, which he did very civilly, and then he showed her how to fish, and then I asked him to tea and left them alone a bit, and when I came back they were talking about teleopathy, and her glass ball, and all that nonsense.  And he seemed interested, but not to believe in it quite.  I could not understand half their tipsycakical lingo.  So of course they often met again at the river, and he often came to tea, and she seemed to take to him—­she was always one for the men.  And at last a very queer thing happened, and gave him his chance.

’It was a very hot day in July, and she fell asleep on a seat under a tree with her glass ball in her lap; she had been staring at it, I suppose.  Any way she slept on, till the sun went round and shone full on the ball; and just as he, Mr. Jephson, that is, came into the gate, the glass ball began to act like a burning glass and her skirt began to smoke.  Well, he waited a bit, I think, till the skirt blazed a little, and then he rushed up and threw his coat over her skirt, and put the fire out.  And so he saved her from being a Molochaust, like you read about in the bible.’

Merton mentally disengaged the word ‘Molochaust’ into ‘Moloch’ and ‘holocaust.’

’And there she was, when I happened to come by, a-crying and carrying on, with her head on his shoulder.’

‘A pleasing group, and so they were engaged on the spot?’ asked Merton.

’Not she!  She held off, and thanked her preserver; but she would be true, she said, to her lover in cocky.  But before that Mr. Jephson had taken me into his confidence.’

‘And you made no objection to his winning your ward, if he could?’

‘No, sir, I could trust that young man:  I could trust him with Barbara.’

‘His arguments,’ said Merton, ‘must have been very cogent?’

‘He understood my situation if she married, and what I deserved,’ said Mrs. Nicholson, growing rather uncomfortable, and fidgeting in the client’s chair.

Merton, too, understood, and knew what the sympathetic arguments of Jephson must have been.

‘And, after all,’ Merton asked, ‘the lover has prospered in his suit?’

’This is how he got round her.  He said to me that night, in private:  “Mrs. Nicholson,” said he, “your niece is a very interesting historical subject.  I am deeply anxious, apart from my own passion for her, to relieve her from a singular but not very uncommon delusion.”