ve something to say to you. We have nowhere to speak to
each other but here," said Nettie, pausing in the little hall, from
which that childish tumult had died away in sudden awe of her presence;
"but we have spoken to each other here before now. I did not mean to
vex you then--at least, I did mean to vex you, but nothing more." Here
she paused with a sob, the echo of her past trouble breaking upon her
words, as happened from time to time, like the passion of a child; then
burst forth again a moment after in a sudden question. "Will you let me
have Freddy?" she cried, surrendering at discretion, and looking eagerly
up in the doctor's face; "if they will leave him, may I keep him with
me?"

It is unnecessary to record the doctor's answer. He would have
swallowed not Fred only, but Mrs Fred and the entire family, had that
gulp been needful to satisfy Nettie, but was not sufficiently blinded
to his own interests to grant this except under certain conditions
satisfactory to himself. When the doctor mounted the drag again he
drove away into Elysium, with a smiling Cupid behind him, instead of
the little groom who had been his unconscious master's confidant so
long, and had watched the fluctuations of his wooing with such lively
curiosity. Those patients who had paid for Dr Rider's disappointments in
many a violent prescription, got compensation to-day in honeyed draughts
and hopeful prognostications. Wherever the doctor went he saw a vision
of that little drooping head, reposing, after all the agitation of the
morning, in the silence and rest he had enjoined, with brilliant eyes,
half-veiled, shining with thoughts in which he had the greatest share;
and, with that picture before his eyes, went flashing along the wintry
road with secret smiles, and carried hope wherever he went. Of course it
was the merest fallacy, so far as Nettie's immediate occupation was
concerned. That restless little woman had twenty times too much to
do to think of rest--more to do than ever in all the suddenly-changed
preparations which fell upon her busy hands. But the doctor kept his
imagination all the same, and pleased himself with thoughts of her
reposing in a visionary tranquillity, which, wherever it was to be
found, certainly did not exist in St Roque's Cottage, in that sudden
tumult of new events and hopes.

CHAPTER XVIII.

"I always thought there was good in him by his looks," said Miss
Wodehouse, standing in the porch of St Roque