Miss Fanny was awfully jolly.  Then he said to himself, that holy orders don’t hinder a man being a man, and Miss Fanny was, really was, awfully jolly, and boarding in the houses of uncultivated farmers was an awful bore.  But this was nothing to what was going on in the studiously avoided work room.  The lawyer’s hands were being washed, because a voice from an arch-looking face said that he was a big baby, and didn’t know how to wash himself.  It was quite a big baby in size and aspect that was soaped and glycerined, and had some other stuff rubbed into his hands by other pretty hands, one of which wore the victim’s ring.  Corry felt that he could stand it, even to the putting on of the minister’s gloves.  When she had finished her work, the hospital nurse said, “that silly little Marjorie, angry because Cecile would not allow her to read fairy stories to Mr. Wilkinson, surrendered you to me.”

“O Marjorie, my darlin’, and would you throw your lovely self away on a poor, stupid, worthless thing like me?”

CHAPTER XV.

     Miss Carmichael Snubs and Thinks—­The Constable and the
     Prisoner—­Matilda and the Doctor—­The Children Botanize—­Pressing
     Specimens—­Nomenclature—­The Colonel Makes a Discovery—­Miss
     Carmichael Does Not Fancy Wilks—­Mr. Newberry Takes Matilda—­Mr.
     Pawkins Makes Mischief and is Punished—­Rounds on
     Sylvanus—­Preparations for Inquest

“Mr. Coristine, I never gave you permission to call me by my Christian name, much less to think that I accepted Marjorie’s foolish little charge.  I am sorry if I have led you to believe that I acted so bold, so shameless a part.”

“Oh, Miss Carmichael, forgive me.  I’m stupid, as I said, but, as the Bible has it, I’ll try and keep a watch on the door of my lips in future.  And you such an angel of mercy, too!  Please, Miss Carmichael, pardon a blundering Irishman.”

“Nonsense,” she answered.  “I have nothing to pardon; only, I did not want you to misunderstand me.”  The gloves were on, and she shook hands with him, and laughed a comical little insincere laugh in his face, and ran away to her own room to have a foolish little cry.  She heard her friend Cecile reading poetry to the wounded Wilkinson, and, looking out of her window, saw Mr. Perrowne helping her uncle to lift the doctor’s chair out into the garden, and her mother, freed from conversation with the madwoman, plucking a flower for Mr. Errol’s coat.  There, too, was a young man, his hands encased in black kid gloves, sitting down on a bench with Mr. Terry, and with difficulty filling a meerschaum pipe.  She thought he had a quiet, disappointed look, like a man’s whose warm, generous impulses have been checked, and she felt guilty.  It was true they had not known one another long, but what was she, a teacher in a common school, that was what people called them, to put on airs before such a man