“O Miss Carmichael, now, please let me off this once, and I’ll never do it again.  You know it’s so hard working in gloves.  Understand me as saying that botanically, in a Pickwickian sense as it were, and not really at all.”

“You must not say that, either botanically or any other way.”

“To hear the faintest whisper of your slightest command is to obey.”

It was delicate work arranging these little Speedwells, and Gratiolas, the Wood-Sorrels, and the smaller Monkey-flower.  Hands had to follow very close on one another, and heads to be bent to examine, and sometimes there was just a little brush of brown and golden hair that, strange to say, sent responsive tingles along the nerves, and warm flushes to cheek and brow.  What a hopeless idiot he was not to have foreseen the possibility of this, and to have brought home twice the number of specimens!  Alas! they were all in the press.  But, a happy thought struck him:  would Miss Carmichael care to look at the dried ones, some of which had kept their colour very well?  Yes, she had a few minutes to spare.  So, he brought chairs up to the table, and they sat down, side by side, and he told her all about the flowers and how he got them, and the poetry Wilks and he quoted over them.  Then the specimens had to be critically examined, so as to let Miss Carmichael learn the distinctive characteristics of the various orders, and this brought the heads close together again, when suddenly their owners were started by the unexpected clang of the dinner gong.  “Thank you so much, Mr. Coristine,” said the lady, frankly; “you have given me a very pleasant half hour.”  The lawyer bowed his acknowledgment, but said, beneath his moustache:  “Half an hour is it?  I thought it was a lifetime rolled up in two minutes, no, one.”

What did those deceitful men, Errol and Perrowne, mean, by saying they had to go away to get up their Wednesday evening talk, and to visit their parishioners?  There they were, in their old places at the table, Mr. Errol at Mrs. Carmichael’s right, and apparently on the best of terms with her, and Mr. Perrowne dancing attendance upon Miss Halbert and her invalid father.  Mrs. Du Plessis thought she would take up Mr. Wilkinson’s dinner with the colonel’s help, as Cecile had been reading to him so long.  Accordingly, the Captain talked to that young lady, while Mr. Bangs monopolized Mrs. Carruthers.  There was a little commotion, when Mr. Bigglethorpe walked in, and received the sympathetic expressions of the company over his singed face and scorched hands.  In spite of these, the sufferer had been up early fishing, just after the rain.  Fortunately, he continued, there was no cleared land about the lakes, hence there were very few grasshoppers washed in by the heavy downpour.  Had there been, he wouldn’t have got a fish.  But he had got fish, a big string of them, in splendid condition.  He had left some with his kind entertainers, the Richards, but had plenty remaining, which he had left in the kitchen in care of the young woman with the unpronounceable Scripture name.  “Now,” said the fisherman, “a nime is a very important thing to a man or a woman.  Why do people give their children such awful names?  Bigglethorpe is Dinish, they say, but Felix Isidore is as Latin as can be.  They called me ‘fib’ at school.”