“I do think it is not canny,” she said, as if it had been one of his symptoms.

“Do you want me to prescribe for it?”

“I did try one prescription for having too big a soul; I turned my poor little boy loose into school, and there they half killed him for me, and made the original complaint worse.”

“Happily no prescription, ’neither life, nor death, nor any other creature,’ can cure that complaint,” said the good old doctor, “though, alas! it is only too apt to dry up from within.”

“Still I can’t help feeling it rather awful to have to do with a being so spiritual as that, and it appears to me to increase on him, so that he never seems quite to belong to me.  And precocity is a dangerous sign, is it not?”

“I see,” said the doctor, smiling; “you are going to be a treasure to the faculty, and indulge in anxieties and consultations.”

“Now, Dr. Lucas, you know that we were always anxious about Armine.  You remember his father said he needed more care than the rest.”

Dr. Lucas allowed that this was true; but he only recommended flannel, pale ale, moderation in study, and time to recover the effects of the pump.

Both the good old friends were very kind and full of tender congratulation, mingled with a little anxiety, though they were pleased with her good taste and simplicity and absence of all elation.  But then she had hardly realised the new position, and seemed to look neither behind nor before.  Her only scheme seemed to be to take a house in London for a few months, and then perhaps to go abroad, but of this she could not talk in those old scenes which vividly brought back that castle in the air, never fulfilled, of a holiday in Switzerland with Joe.

On leaving the Lucases, she sent her boys on before her to the nearest bazaar, and was soon at her old home.  Kind Mrs. Drake effaced herself as much as possible, and let her roam about the house alone, but furniture had altered every room, so that no responsive chord was touched till she came to the study, which was little changed.  There she shut herself in and strove to recall the touch of the hand that was gone, the sound of the voice that was still.  She stood, where she had been wont to stand over her husband, when he had been busy at his table and she had run down with some inquiry, and with a yearning ache of heart she clasped her hands, and almost breathed out the words, “O Joe, Joe, dear father!  Oh! for one moment of you to tell me what to do, and how to keep true to the charge you gave me—-your Magnum Bonum!”

So absolutely had she asked the question, that she waited, almost expecting a reply, but there was no voice and none to answer her; and she was turning away with a sickening sense of mockery at her own folly in seeking the empty shrine whence the oracle of her life had departed, when her eye fell on the engraving over the mantel-piece.  It was the one thing for which Mr. Drake had begged as a memorial of Joe Brownlow, and it still hung in its old place.  It was of the Great Physician, consoling and healing all around-—the sick, the captive, the self-tormenting genius, the fatherless, the widow.