‘I do think she is better since last night,’ said she.  ’Her eyes look brighter, and her complexion clearer.’

‘God bless you,’ said her father, earnestly.  ’But is it true?  Yesterday was so sultry every one felt ill.  It was a most unlucky day for Mr. Donaldson to see her on.’

So he went away to his day’s duties, now increased by the preparation of some lectures he had promised to deliver to the working people at a neighbouring Lyceum.  He had chosen Ecclesiastical Architecture as his subject, rather more in accordance with his own taste and knowledge than as falling in with the character of the place or the desire for particular kinds of information among those to whom he was to lecture.  And the institution itself, being in debt, was only too glad to get a gratis course from an educated and accomplished man like Mr. Hale, let the subject be what it might.

‘Well, mother,’ asked Mr. Thornton that night, ’who have accepted your invitations for the twenty-first?’

’Fanny, where are the notes?  The Slicksons accept, Collingbrooks accept, Stephenses accept, Browns decline.  Hales—­father and daughter come,—­mother too great an invalid—­Macphersons come, and Mr. Horsfall, and Mr. Young.  I was thinking of asking the Porters, as the Browns can’t come.’

’Very good.  Do you know, I’m really afraid Mrs. Hale is very far from well, from what Dr. Donaldson says.’

’It’s strange of them to accept a dinner-invitation if she’s very ill,’ said Fanny.

‘I didn’t say very ill,’ said her brother, rather sharply.  ’I only said very far from well.  They may not know it either.’  And then he suddenly remembered that, from what Dr. Donaldson had told him, Margaret, at any rate, must be aware of the exact state of the case.

’Very probably they are quite aware of what you said yesterday, John—­of the great advantage it would be to them—­to Mr. Hale, I mean, to be introduced to such people as the Stephenses and the Collingbrooks.’

’I’m sure that motive would not influence them.  No!  I think I understand how it is.’

‘John!’ said Fanny, laughing in her little, weak, nervous way.  ’How you profess to understand these Hales, and how you never will allow that we can know anything about them.  Are they really so very different to most people one meets with?’

She did not mean to vex him; but if she had intended it, she could not have done it more thoroughly.  He chafed in silence, however, not deigning to reply to her question.

‘They do not seem to me out of the common way,’ said Mrs. Thornton.  ’He appears a worthy kind of man enough; rather too simple for trade—­so it’s perhaps as well he should have been a clergyman first, and now a teacher.  She’s a bit of a fine lady, with her invalidism; and as for the girl—­she’s the only one who puzzles me when I think about her,—­which I don’t often do.  She seems to have a great notion of giving herself airs; and I can’t make out why.  I could almost fancy she thinks herself too good for her company at times.  And yet they’re not rich, from all I can hear they never have been.’