idemic
broke out, and Robert, feeling it a comfort to be rid of him, had thrown
the whole business into the hands of Meyrick and his son. This son was
nominally his father's junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young
and brilliant M.D. fresh from a great hospital, and his father was just
a poor old general practitioner, with the barest qualification and only
forty years' experience to recommend him, it will easily be imagined
that the subordination was purely nominal. Indeed young Meyrick was fast
ousting his father in all directions, and the neighborhood, which had
so far found itself unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene
without old Meyrick's assistance, was beginning to send notes to the
house in Charton High Street, whereon the superscription 'Dr. _Edward_
Meyrick' was underlined with ungrateful emphasis. The father took
his deposition very quietly. Only on Murewell Hall would he allow no
trespassing, and so long as his son left him undisturbed there, he took
his effacement in other quarters with perfect meekness.

Young Elsmere's behavior to him, however, at a time when all the rest
of the Churton world was beginning to hold him cheap and let him see it,
had touched the old man's heart, and he was the Rector's slave in this
Mile End business. Edward Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the
hamlet once a day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him.
His attainments, of course, were useful, but his cocksureness was
irritating, and his manner to his father, abominable. The father, on the
other hand, came over in the shabby pony-cart he had driven for the last
forty years, and having himself no press of business, would spend hours
with the Rector over the cases, giving them an infinity of patient
watching, and amusing Robert by the cautious hostility he would allow
himself every now and then toward his souls newfangled devices.

At first Meyrick showed himself fidgety as to the Squire. Had he been
seen, been heard from? He received Robert's sharp negatives with long
sighs, but Robert clearly saw that, like the rest of the world, he was
too much afraid of Mr. Wendover to go and beard him. Some months before,
as it happened, Elsmere had told him the story of his encounter with the
Squire, and had been a good deal moved and surprised by the old man's
concern.

One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, when the
state of things in the hamlet was beginning decidedly to me