-day we have to leave tomorrow. You
shall return in time for Mrs. Mountstuart's dinner. Friends will take
us in, the Darletons, the Erpinghams. We can go to Oxford, where you
are sure of welcome. A little will recover me. Do not mention doctors.
But you see I am nervous. I am quite ashamed of it; I am well enough to
laugh at it, only I cannot overcome it; and I feel that a day or two
will restore me. Say you will. Say it in First-Lesson-Book language;
anything above a primer splits my foolish head to-day."

Dr Middleton shrugged, spreading out his arms.

"The office of ambassador from you to Willoughby, Clara? You decree me
to the part of ball between two bats. The Play being assured, the
prologue is a bladder of wind. I seem to be instructed in one of the
mysteries of erotic esotery, yet on my word I am no wiser. If
Willoughby is to hear anything from you, he will hear it from your
lips."

"Yes, father, yes. We have differences. I am not fit for contests at
present; my head is giddy. I wish to avoid an illness. He and I . . . I
accuse myself."

"There is the bell!" ejaculated Dr. Middleton. "I'll debate on it with
Willoughby."

"This afternoon?"

"Somewhen, before the dinner-bell. I cannot tie myself to the
minute-hand of the clock, my dear child. And let me direct you, for the
next occasion when you shall bring the vowels I and A, in verbally
detached letters, into collision, that you do not fill the hiatus with
so pronounced a Y. It is the vulgarization of our tongue of which I
accuse you. I do not like my girl to be guilty of it."

He smiled to moderate the severity of the correction, and kissed her
forehead.

She declared her inability to sit and eat; she went to her room, after
begging him very earnestly to send her the assurance that he had
spoken. She had not shed a tear, and she rejoiced in her self-control;
it whispered to her of true courage when she had given herself such
evidence of the reverse.

Shower and sunshine alternated through the half-hours of the afternoon,
like a procession of dark and fair holding hands and passing. The
shadow came, and she was chill; the light yellow in moisture, and she
buried her face not to be caught up by cheerfulness. Believing that her
head ached, she afflicted herself with all the heavy symptoms, and
oppressed her mind so thoroughly that its occupation was to speculate
on Laetitia Dale's modest enthusiasm for rural pleasures, for this
place especially, with