rprised out of seven days' sleep if this business involves
a visit to the churchyard before we get to the other side of it."

John Knott stood with his back to the Chapel-Room fire, his shoulders
up to his ears, his hands forced down into the pockets of his
riding-breeches. Without, black-thorn winter held the land in its
cheerless grasp. The spring was late. Night frosts obtained, followed
by pallid, half-hearted sunshine in the early mornings, too soon
obliterated by dreary, easterly blight. This afternoon offered
exception to the rule only in the additional discomfort of small,
sleeting rain and a harsh skirling of wind in the eastward-facing
casements.--"Livery weather," the doctor called it, putting down his
existing lapse from philosophic tolerance to insufficient secretions of
the biliary duct.

Before him stood Clara--sometime Dickie Calmady's devoted nurse and
playfellow--her eyes very bright and moist, the reds and whites of her
fresh complexion in lamentable disarray.

"I'd never have believed it of Sir Richard," she assented, chokingly.
"It isn't like him, so pretty as he was in all his little ways, and
loving to her ladyship, and civilly behaved to everybody, and careful
of hurting anybody's feelings--more so than you'd expect in a young
gentleman like him. No! it isn't like him. In my opinion he's been got
hold of by some designing person, who's worked on him to keep him away
to serve their own ends. There, I'd never have believed it of him, that
I wouldn't!"

The doctor's massive head sank lower, his massive shoulders rose
higher, his loose lips twisted into a snarling smile.

"Lord bless you, that's nothing new! We none of us ever do believe it
of them when the little beggars are in long clothes, or first breeched
for that matter. It's a trick of Mother Nature's--one-idead old lady,
who cares not a pin for morality, but only for increase. She knows well
enough if we did believe it of them we should clear them off wholesale,
along with the blind kittens and puppies. A bucket full of water, and
broom to keep them under, would make for a mighty lessening of
subsequent violations of the Decalogue! Don't tell me King Herod was
not something of a philanthropist when he got to work on the infant
population of Bethlehem. One woman wept for each of the little brats
then, but his Satanic Majesty only knows how many women wouldn't have
had cause to weep for each one of them later, if they'd been spared to
gro