She offered to bring Felina to lick off the stubble on her friend’s chin, but that friend, in a wheezy whistling voice, begged that Maguffin might be substituted for the cat, in case pussy might scratch him.  Maguffin came with the colonel’s razors, and Marjorie looked on, while he gave the author of his present fortunes a clean shave, and made ironical remarks about moustache trimming.  “Guess the man what trimmed yoh mustash fought he was a bahbah, sah?” The patient smiled seraphically, and whistled in his throat.  “Never want to have a better, Maguffin.”

“It’s awful, Guff, isn’t it?” asked Miss Thomas, and continued, “it quite gives me the horrows!”

“Dey’s bahbahs and dey’s bahbahs,” replied the coloured gentlemen, “and I doan want ter blame a gennelum as cayn’t help hisself.”

The barbering completed, Marjorie junior was dismissed with her ally Guff, and the senior lady of that name reigned supreme.  The eyes of the feeble invalid, whose heart had been hungering and thirsting for love during a month that had seemed a lifetime, followed her all over the room, and almost stopped beating when she went near the door.  But she came back, and held that hot fevered hand on which her modest ring glistened, and cooled his brow, and made him take his sloppy food, and answered back in soft but cheery tones his deprecating whispers.  She had him now safe, and would tyrannize over him, she said; till, spite of the weakness and the sharp pains, his eye began to twinkle with something of the old happy light that seemed to be of so long ago, and, smilingly, he murmured:  “We are not ready for our graves yet.”  Miss Carmichael looked severe, and held up a warning finger.  “Repeat that, Eugene, and I will send her to take care of you at once,” she said; “that is, if she will leave her dear Mr. Douglas for a poor bed-ridden creature like you.”  As an affectionate salute followed these words, it may be presumed they were not so harsh as they sounded.  The doctor came in time for breakfast, but, before partaking of that meal, he visited his patient, eased his bandages, looked to the wounds, and praised the nurse.  “He could not be doing better,” he said, as he cheerfully descended to the breakfast table.

The constable had respected the sanctity of the Sabbath, and was still in the kitchen, while his prisoners languished in the stables.  Tryphena presided over the morning meal, at which Timotheus and Ben sat; and Tryphosa, who had just descended from her labours in the sick room, was giving them so touching and poetical an account of the invalid and his nurses that Timotheus began seriously to consider the propriety of having some frightful injury inflicted upon his own person.  Mr. Toner related for the tenth time how the spurious doctor had cured him, and then proceeded to tell of Serlizer’s wonderful skill in pulling through her shot-riddled old reprobate of a father, till “he was eenamost as good as new and a mighty