retain others--the words extorted from him, the frantic action which he
now blushed to remember?

"Brother," said she, "what _was_ the meaning of something that I heard
some one say, just as I sat up on the bank? `There's a baulk for the
doctor! He is baulked of a body in his own house.'"

"Oh, Margaret," cried her sister, who sat looking at her all the evening
as if they had been parted for ten years, "you dreamed that. It was a
fancy. Think what a state your poor head was in! It may have a few
strange imaginations left in it still. May it not, Edward?"

"This is not one," he replied. "She heard very accurately."

"What did they mean?"

"There is a report abroad about me, arising out of the old prejudice
about dissection. Some of my neighbours think that dissecting is the
employment and the passion of my life, and that I rob the churchyard as
often as anybody is buried."

"Oh, Edward! how frightful! how ridiculous!"

"It is very disagreeable, my dear. I am taunted with this wherever I
go."

"What is to be done?"

"We must wait till the prejudices against me die out: but I see that we
shall have to wait some time; for before one suspicion is given up,
another rises."

"Since that unhappy election," said Hester, sighing. "What a strange
thing it is that men like you should be no better treated! Here is Mrs
Enderby taken out of your hands, and your neighbours suspecting and
slandering you, whose commonest words they are not worthy to repeat."

"My dear Hester!" said he, in a tone of serious remonstrance. "That is
rather a wife-like way of putting the case, to be sure," said Margaret,
smiling: "but, in as far as it is true, the matter surely ceases to be
strange. Good men do not come into the world to be what the world calls
fortunate, but to be something far better. The best men do not use the
means to be rich, to be praised by their neighbours, to be out of the
way of trouble; and if they will not use the means, it does not become
them--nor their wives--to be discouraged at losing their occupation, or
being slandered, or suspected as dangerous people."

Edward's smile thanked her, and so did her sister's kiss. But Hester
looked grave again when she said--"I suppose we shall know, sooner or
later, why it is that good people are not to be happy here, and that the
more they love one another, the more struggles and sorrows they have to
undergo."

"Do we not know something of it already?" said H