Harold came home for a little while just as we were having breakfast, to bring a report that his patient had had a much quieter night than he expected, and to say that he had telegraphed for the brother and wanted Eustace to meet him at the station.  The landlady was sitting with the patient now, and Harold had come home for ice, strawberries, and, above all, to ask for help in nursing, for the landlady could not, and would not, do much.  I mentioned a motherly woman as, perhaps, likely to be useful, but Harold said, “I could do best with Dora.”

He had so far learnt that it was not the Bush as not to expect me to offer, and was quite unprepared for the fire that Eustace and I opened on him as to the impossibility of his request.  “Miss Alison, my sister,” as Eustace said, “going down to a little, common, general practitioner to wait on him;” while I confined myself to “It won’t do at all, Harold,” and promised to hunt up the woman and to send her to his aid.  But when I had seen her, arranged my housekeeping affairs, and called Dora to lessons, she was nowhere to be found.

“Then she has gone after Harold!” indignantly exclaimed Eustace.  “It is too bad!  I declare I will put a stop to it!  To have my sister demeaning herself to put herself in such a situation for a little Union doctor!”

I laughed, and observed that no great harm was done with so small a person, only I could not think what use Harold could make of her; at which Eustace was no less surprised, for a girl of eight or nine was of no small value in the Bush, and he said Dora had been most helpful in the care of her father.  But his dignity was so much outraged that he talked big of going to bring her home—­only he did not go.  I was a little wounded at Harold having taken her in the face of my opposition, but I found that that had not been the case, for Eustace had walked to the lodge with him, and she had rushed after and joined him after he was in the town.  And at luncheon Eustace fell on me with entreaties that I would come with him and help him meet “this parson,” whom he seemed to dread unreasonably, as, in fact, he always did shrink from doing anything alone when he could get a helper.  I thought this would be, at least, as queer as Dora’s nursing of the other brother; but it seemed so hard for the poor man, coming down in his anxiety, to be met by Eustace either in his vague or his supercilious mood, that I consented at last, so that he might have someone of common sense, and walked down with him.

We could not doubt which was the right passenger, when a young clergyman, almost as rough-looking as his brother, and as much bearded, but black where he was yellow, sprang out of a second-class with anxious looks.  It was I who said at one breath, “There he is!  Speak to him, Eustace!  Mr. Yolland—­he is better—­he will do well—­”

“Thank—­thank you—­” And the hat was pushed back, with a long breath; then, as he only had a little black bag to look after, we all walked together to the lodgings, while the poor man looked bewildered and unrealising under Eustace’s incoherent history of the accident—­a far more conjectural and confused story than it became afterwards.