’Well, I suppose he must represent the reeds.  You know the story of King Midas’s barber, who found out that his royal master had the ears of an ass beneath his hyacinthine curls.  So the barber, in default of a Mr. Wynne, went to the reeds that grew on the shores of a neighbouring lake, and whispered to them, “King Midas has the ears of an ass.”  But he repeated it so often that the reeds learnt the words, and kept on saying them all the day long, till at the last the secret was no secret at all.  If you keep on telling your tale to Mr. Wynne, are you sure he won’t repeat it in his turn?’

’If I pledge my word as a gentleman, sir, I pledge it for Mr. Wynne as well.’

’I suppose I must run the risk.  But remember how soon a young girl’s name may be breathed upon, and sullied.  Molly has no mother, and for that very reason she ought to move among you all, as unharmed as Una herself.’

‘Mr. Gibson, if you wish it, I’ll swear it on the Bible,’ cried the excitable young man.

’Nonsense.  As if your word, if it’s worth anything, was not enough!  We’ll shake hands upon it, if you like.’

Mr. Coxe came forward eagerly, and almost squeezed Mr. Gibson’s ring into his finger.

As he was leaving the room, he said, a little uneasily, ’May I give Bethia a crown-piece?’

’No, indeed!  Leave Bethia to me.  I hope you won’t say another word to her while she is here.  I shall see that she gets a respectable place when she goes away.’

Then Mr. Gibson rang for his horse, and went out on the last visits of the day.  He used to reckon that he rode the world around in the course of the year.  There were not many surgeons in the county who had so wide a range of practice as he; he went to lonely cottages on the borders of great commons; to farm-houses at the end of narrow country lanes that led to nowhere else, and were overshadowed by the elms and beeches overhead.  He attended all the gentry within a circle of fifteen miles round Hollingford; and was the appointed doctor to the still greater families who went up to London every February—­as the fashion then was—­ and returned to their acres in the early weeks of July.  He was, of necessity, a great deal from home, and on this soft and pleasant summer evening he felt the absence as a great evil.  He was startled into discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman, and already the passive object of some of the strong interests that affect a woman’s life; and he—­her mother as well as her father—­so much away that he could not guard her as he would have wished.  The end of his cogitations was that ride to Hamley the next morning, when he proposed to allow his daughter to accept Mrs. Hamley’s last invitation—­an invitation that had been declined at the time.

’You may quote against me the proverb, “He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay.”  And I shall have no reason to complain,’ he had said.