Hardly had she crossed the dreary village street encumbered with piles of half-melted snow and mud, than she espied Peter picking his way toward her, his silk hat brushed to a turn, his gray surtout buttoned close, showing but the edge of his white silk muffler, his carefully rolled umbrella serving as a divining rod the better to detect the water holes.  No one who met him and looked into his fresh, rosy face, or caught the merry twinkle of his eyes, would ever have supposed he had been pouring liniment over broken arms and bandaged fingers until two o’clock in the morning of the night before.  It had only been when Bolton’s sister had discovered an empty “cell,” as Jack called the bedroom next to his, that he had abandoned his intention of camping out on Jack’s disheartened lounge, and had retired like a gentleman carrying with him all his toilet articles, ready to be set out in the morning.

Long before that time he had captured everybody in the place:  from Mrs. Hicks, who never dreamed that such a well of tenderness over suffering could exist in an old fellow’s heart, down to the freckled-faced boy who came for his muddy shoes and who, after a moment’s talk with Peter as to how they should be polished, retired later in the firm belief that they belonged to “a gent way up in G,” as he expressed it, he never having waited on “the likes of him before.”  As to Bolton, he thought he was the “best ever,” and as to his prim, patient sister who had closed her school to be near her brother—­she declared to Mrs. Hicks five minutes after she had laid her eyes on him, that Mr. Breen’s uncle was “just too dear for anything,”—­to which the lady with the movable hair and mob-cap not only agreed, but added the remark of her own, “that folks like him was a sight better than the kind she was a-gettin’.”

All these happenings of the night and early hours of this bright, beautiful morning—­and it was bright and sunny overhead despite the old fellow’s precautionary umbrella—­had helped turn out the spick and span gentleman who was now making his way carefully over the unpaved road which stood for Corklesville’s principal street.

Miss Felicia saw him first.

“Oh! there you are!” she cried before he could raise his eyes.  “Did you ever see anything so disgraceful as this crossing—­not a plank—­nothing.  No—­get out of my way, Peter; you will just upset me, and I would rather help myself.”

In reply Peter, promptly ignoring her protest, stepped in front of her, poked into several fraudulent solidities covering unfathomable depths, found one hard enough to bear the weight of Miss Felicia’s dainty shoe—­it was about as long as a baby’s hand—­and holding out his own said, in his most courtly manner: 

“Be very careful now, my dear:  put your foot on mine; so! now give me your hand and jump.  There—­that’s it.”  To see Peter help a lady across a muddy street, Holker Morris always said, was a lesson in all the finer virtues.  Sir Walter was a bungler beside him.  But then Miss Felicia could also have passed muster as the gay gallant’s companion.