s was told to him; and
he had saluted the doctor as Brother Brownlee upon the occasion of his
next visit.

"It's just too jolly," he had said, with the first return of his old,
irrepressible manner. "I'd rather have you take Lou than anybody else I
know; and I'm no end glad I helped it on. You know you'd never have come
to the point, if I hadn't scared you both out of your senses; but"--he
paused, and then asked wickedly, "but I say, Lou, what do you suppose
the Reverend Gabriel will have to say about it?"

The Reverend Gabriel, in the mean time, had kept himself informed on the
subject of Ned's illness, and although he had held himself at a prudent
distance from all danger of infection, he had not neglected the young
invalid. As soon as it was definitely known that the boy was on the way
to recovery, Dr. Hornblower had sent him, through the safe medium of the
post-office, a little book of "Sick-room Meditations," whose black cover
bore the cheering design of a tomb under a pair of weeping willows.
Though the gift was doubtless intended in all kindness, it was received
with more amusement than gratitude, and Ned kept it under his pillow to
read aloud choice bits from it, whenever Louise and Dr. Brownlee were
together in his room.

But, during the weeks that the Reverend Gabriel had been unable to call
at the Everetts'; he had been slowly making up his mind upon a matter
of weighty importance; and now at length the time had come for him to
carry out his intentions.

The Reverend Gabriel Hornblower, it should be stated, was a romantic
soul; and, in his tanned, weather-beaten old body, there throbbed a
heart as ardent as ever beat in the breast of a boy of eighteen. Its
manifestations, however, were often a little eccentric, for its owner
was as ignorant and unworldly as a child. For years he had fed his
elderly imagination upon the most impassioned love scenes to be found in
the pages of novel or biography. Unfortunately for him, there was
nothing in the least modern about his literary taste; but he had
confined his reading to the histories of the Evelinas and Cherubinas of
yore, until his idea of the tender passion was as old-fashioned and
stilted as the books from which it had been derived. Nevertheless, the
Reverend Gabriel was becoming weary of boarding-house existence, and
beginning to long for the comforts of home and the charms of conjugal
society.

It would be hard to say whether the sight of Louise Everett'