more of a star in her own old neighbourhood than she could be in London, and wisely abstained from a full flight till she had tried her wings.  It was much pleasanter to go along with Bessie’s many far better and more affectionate reasons for prudence, and her minutely personal confidences about her habits, hopes, and fears, given with a strong sense of her own importance and consideration, yet with a warm sisterly tone that made them tokens of adoption, and with an arch drollery that invested them with a sort of grace.  The number of engagements that she mentioned in town and country did indeed seem inconsistent with the prudence she spoke of with regard to her own health, or with her attention to that of her husband; but it appeared that all were quite necessary and according to his wishes, and the London ones were usually for the sake of trying to detach his daughter, Mrs. Comyn Menteith, from the extravagant set among whom she had fallen.  Bessie was excessively diverting in her accounts of her relations with this scatter-brained step-daughter of hers, and altogether showed in the most flattering manner how much more thoroughly she felt herself belonging to her brother’s wife.  If she had ever been amazed or annoyed at Alick’s choice, she had long ago surmounted the feeling, or put it out of sight, and she judiciously managed to leap over all that had passed since the beginning of the intimacy that had arisen at the station door at Avoncester.  It was very flattering, and would have been perfectly delightful, if Rachel had not found herself wearying for Alick, and wondering whether at the end of seven months she should be as contented as Bessie seemed, to know her husband to be in the sitting-room without one sight of him.

At luncheon, however, when Lord Keith appeared, nothing could be prettier than his wife’s manner to him—­bright, sweet, and with a touch of graceful deference, at which he always smiled and showed himself pleased, but Rachel thought him looking much older than in the autumn—­he had little appetite, stooped a good deal, and evidently moved with pain.  He would not go out of doors, and Bessie, after following him to the library, and spending a quarter of an hour in ministering to his comfort, took Rachel to sit by a cool dancing fountain in the garden, and began with some solicitude to consult her whether he could be really suffering from sciatica, or, as she had lately begun to suspect, from the effects of a blow from the end of a scaffold-pole that had been run against him when taking her through a crowded street.  Rachel spoke of advice.

“What you, Rachel! you who despised allopathy!”

“I have learnt not to despise advice.”

And Bessie would not trench on Rachel’s experiences.

“There’s some old Scotch doctor to whom his faith is given, and that I don’t half believe in.  If he would see our own Mr. Harvey here it would be quite another thing; but it is of no use telling him that Alick would never have had an available knee but for Mr. Harvey’s management.  He persists in leaving me to my personal trust in him, but for himself he won’t see him at any price!  Have you seen Mr. Harvey?”