Visitors to the Forest were too numerous in summer to attract notice.  Mr. Carnegie lifted his head for a moment, and then continued his assiduities to a lovely old yellow rose which had manifested delicate symptoms earlier in the season.  Next to his wife and children the doctor was fond of roses.  The travellers rode past to the door of the “King’s Arms,” and there dismounted.  Half an hour after they were dining in an up-stairs, bow-windowed room which commanded a cheerful prospect up and down the village street, with a view of the church opposite and a side glance of Mr. Carnegie’s premises.  They witnessed the return of Bessie and the boys, and the fatherly help and reception they had.  They saw the doctor lift up Bessie’s face to look at her, saw him pat her on the shoulder encouragingly as she made him some brief communication, saw him open the door and send her into the house, and then hurry round to the stable to prevent the boys lingering while Jerry was rubbed down.  He had leisure and the heart, it seemed, for all such offices of kindness, and his voice was the signal of instant obedience.

Later in the evening they were all out in the garden—­Mrs. Carnegie too.  One by one the children were dismissed to bed, and when only Bessie was left, the doctor filled his pipe and had a smoke, walking to and fro under the hedge, over which he conversed at intervals with passing neighbors.  His wife and Bessie sat in the porch.  The only thing in all this that Mr. Fairfax could except to was the doctor’s clay pipe.  He denounced smoking as a low, pernicious habit; the lawyer, more tolerant, remarked that it was an increasing habit and good for the revenue, but bad for him:  he believed that many a quarrel that might have ripened into a lawsuit had prematurely collapsed in the philosophy that comes of tobacco-smoke.

“Perhaps it would prepare me with equanimity to meet my adversary,” said Mr. Fairfax.

Mr. John Short had not intended to give the conversation this turn.  He feared that his client was working himself into an unreasonable humor, in which he would be ready to transfer to Mr. Carnegie the reproaches that were due only to himself.  He was of a suspicious temper, and had already insinuated that the people who had kept his grandchild must have done it from interested and ulterior motives.  The lawyer could not see this, but he did see that if Mr. Fairfax was bent on making a contest of what might be amicably arranged, no power on earth could hinder him.  For though it proverbially takes two to make a quarrel, the doctor did not look as if he would disappoint a man of sharp contention if he sought it.  The soft word that turns away anger would not be of his speaking.

“It will be through sheer mismanagement if there arise a hitch,” Mr. John Short said.  “You desire to obtain possession of the child—­then you must go quietly about it.  She is of an age to speak for herself, and our long neglect may well have forfeited our claim.  She is not your immediate successor; there are infinite possibilities in the lives of your two sons.  If the case were dragged before the courts, she might be given her choice where she would live; and if she has a heart she would stay at Beechhurst, with her father’s widow—­and we are baulked.”