’Do!  I don’t know what you’re to do.  I’m groom enough to bring a mare to water, but I can’t make her drink.’

‘Will waiting be any good?’

’How can I say?  I’ll tell you one thing not to do.  Don’t go and philander with those girls at Heavitree.  It’s my belief that Dorothy has been thinking of them.  People talk to her, of course.’

’I wish people would hold their tongues.  People are so indiscreet.  People don’t know how much harm they may do.’

‘You’ve given them some excuse, you know, Mr Gibson.’

This was very ill-natured, and was felt by Mr Gibson to be so rude, that he almost turned upon his patroness in anger.  He had known Dolly for not more than three months, and had devoted himself to her, to the great anger of his older friends.  He had come this morning true to his appointment, expecting that others would keep their promises to him, as he was ready to keep those which he had made, and now he was told that it was his fault!  ‘I do think that’s rather hard, Miss Stanbury,’ he said.

‘So you have,’ said she ’nasty, slatternly girls, without an idea inside their noddles.  But it’s no use your scolding me.’

‘I didn’t mean to scold, Miss Stanbury.’

‘I’ve done all that I could.’

‘And you think she won’t see me for a minute?’

‘She says she won’t.  I can’t bid Martha carry her down.’

‘Then, perhaps, I had better leave you for the present,’ said Mr Gibson, after another pause.  So he went, a melancholy, blighted man.  Leaving the Close, he passed through into Southernhay, and walked across by the new streets towards the Heavitree road.  He had no design in taking this route, but he went on till he came in sight of the house in which Mrs French lived.  As he walked slowly by it, he looked up at the windows, and something of a feeling of romance came across his heart.  Were his young affections buried there, or were they not?  And, if so, with which of those fair girls were they buried?  For the last two years, up to last night, Camilla had certainly been in the ascendant.  But Arabella was a sweet young woman; and there had been a time when those tender passages were going on in which he had thought that no young woman ever was so sweet.  A period of romance, an era of enthusiasm, a short-lived, delicious holiday of hot-tongued insanity had been permitted to him in his youth but all that was now over.  And yet here he was, with three strings to his bow, so he told himself, and he had not as yet settled for himself the great business of matrimony.  He was inclined to think, as he walked on, that he would walk his life alone, an active, useful, but a melancholy man.  After such experiences as his, how should he ever again speak of his heart to a woman?  During this walk, his mind recurred frequently to Dorothy Stanbury; and, doubtless, he thought that he had often spoken of his heart to her.  He was back at his lodgings before three, at which hour he ate an early dinner, and then took the afternoon cathedral service at four.  The evening he spent at home, thinking of the romance of his early days.  What would Miss Stanbury have said, had she seen him in his easy chair behind the ‘Exeter Argus,’ with a pipe in his mouth?