imilar,
expression of feeling. For tears and speech come easily to a generous
impulsive nature like Gwen's, when strong sympathy and sorrow for others
bid them come, though its own affliction might have made it stupefied
and dumb.

Her father soothed and calmed her as he would a child; for was she not a
child to him--in the nursery only the other day? "I'm not made of wood,
darling, am I?" said he. And Gwen replied, refitting spars in calmer
water:--"No, dear, that you are not, but Lincoln's Inn Fields is.
Sitting there like an Egyptian God, with his hands on his knees!" She
repacked a stray flood of gold that had escaped from its restraints--the
most conspicuous record of the recent gale--and reassured her father
with a liberal kiss. Then she thawed towards the legal mind. "I'm sure
he's very good and kind and all that--Lincoln's Inn Fields, I mean,
is--because people _are_. Only it's at heart they are, and I want it to
come out like a rash." No doubt an interview with Dr. Dalrymple
yesterday was answerable for this, having reference to the Typhus Fever
patient. The eruption, he said, was subsiding favourably, and he was
hourly expecting a fall in the temperature. But he had made a stand
against her seeing the patient.

"If Hawtrey came out in a rash over all his clients' botherations," said
the Earl, "he would very soon be in a state of confluent smallpox. What
he's wanted for now is his brains. You'll see we shall have a letter
from him, clearing it all up...."

"And you know what he'll say, I suppose? That is, if he's as clever as
you think him!"

"I can't say that I feel absolutely certain. What do you suppose?"

Then Gwen gave a very fair conjectural review of the facts as this story
knows them; saying, whenever she felt the ground insecure beneath her
feet, that of course it was this way and not the other. A blessed
expression that, to reinforce one's convictions!

However, she was not far wrong on any point, if the letter her father
received next day from "Lincoln's Inn Fields" was right. It came by
messenger, just as the family were sitting down to lunch with two or
three friends, and his lordship said, "Will you excuse me?" without
waiting for an answer, though one of his guests was a Rajah. Then he
read the letter through, intently, while his Countess looked
thunderclouds at him. "'Fore God, they are both of a tale!" said he,
quoting. Then he sent it to Gwen by Norbury, who was embarrassed by her
lady