Click-click-click-click!  The telegraphic apparatus was at work, and the unofficial operator was entirely engrossed in his business.  Mrs. Tapple stood respectfully dumb and motionless, watching him.  Maryllia, leaning against the ledge of the office counter, watched him, too.  She took quiet observation of the well-poised head, covered with its rich brown-grey waving locks of hair,—­the broad shoulders, the white firm muscular hands that worked the telegraphic instrument, and she was conscious of the impression of authority, order, knowledge, and self-possession, which seemed to have come into the little office with him, and to have created quite a new atmosphere.  Outside, in the small garden, among mignonette and early flowering sweetpeas, Plato sat on his huge haunches in lion-like dignity, blinking at the sun,—­while Walden’s terrier Nebbie executed absurd but entirely friendly gambols in front of him, now pouncing down on two forepaws with nose to ground and eyes leering sideways,—­now wagging an excited tail with excessive violence to demonstrate goodwill and a desire for amity.—­and anon giving a short yelp of suppressed feeling,—­to all of which conciliatory approaches Plato gave no other response than a vast yawn and meditative stare.

The monotonous click-click-click continued,—­now stopping for a second, then going on more rapidly again, till Maryllia began to feel quite unreasonably impatient.  She found something irritating at last in the contemplation of the back of Walden’s cranium,—­it was too well-shaped, she decided,—­she could discover no fault in it.  Humming a tune carelessly under her breath, she turned towards Mrs. Tapple’s small grocery department, and feigned to be absorbed in an admiring survey of peppermint balls and toffee.  Certain glistening squares of sticky white substance on a corner shelf commended themselves to her notice as specimens of stale ‘nougat,’ wherein the almonds represented a remote antiquity,—­and a mass of stringy yellow matter laid out in lumps on blue paper and marked ’One Penny per ounce’ claimed attention as a certain ‘hardbake’ peculiar to St. Rest, which was best eaten in a highly glutinous condition.  A dozen or so of wrinkled apples which, to judge by their damaged and worn exteriors, must have been several autumns old, kept melancholy companionship with assorted packages of the ‘Choice Tea’ whereof the label was displayed in the window, and Maryllia was just about wondering whether she would, or could buy anything out of the musty-fusty collection, when the click-click-click stopped abruptly, and Walden stepped forth from the interior ‘den’ of the post-office.

“That’s all right, Miss Vancourt,” he said.  “Your telegrams are sent correctly as far as Riversford anyhow, and there is one operator there who is acquainted with the French language.  Whether they will transmit correctly from London I shouldn’t like to say!—­we are a singular nation, and one of our singularities is that we scorn to know the language of our nearest neighbours!”