she, while Elsley kept still looking, to hide cheeks
which were growing very red. "He is such a clever man, they say. Where
did you meet him? I have often thought of asking Mr. Vavasour to invite
him up for an evening with his microscope. He seems so superior to the
people round him. It would be a charity, really, Mr. Vavasour."

Vavasour kept his eyes fixed on the zoophyte, and said,--

"I shall be only too delighted, if you wish it."

"You will wish it yourself a second time," chimed in Campbell, "if you
try it once. Perhaps you know nothing of him but professionally.
Unfortunately for professional men, that too often happens."

"Know anything of him--I! I assure you not, save that he attends Mrs.
Vavasour and the children," said Vavasour, looking up at last: but with
an expression of anger which astonished both Valencia and Campbell.

Campbell thought that he was too proud to allow rank as a gentleman to a
country doctor; and despised him from that moment, though, as it
happened, unjustly. But he answered quietly,--

"I assure you, that whatever some country practitioners may be, the
average of them, as far as I have seen, are cleverer men, and even of
higher tone than their neighbours; and Thurnall is beyond the average:
he is a man of the world,--even too much of one,--and a man of science;
and I fairly confess that, what with his wit, his _savoir vivre_, and
his genial good temper, I have quite fallen in love with him in a single
evening; we began last night on the microscope, and ended on all heaven
and earth."

"How I should like to make a third!"

"My dear Queen Whims would hear a good deal of sober sense, then; at
least on one side: but I shall not ask her: for Mr. Thurnall and I have
our deep secrets together."

So spoke the Major, in the simple wish to exalt Tom in a quarter where
he hoped to get him practice; and his "secret" was a mere jest,
unnecessary, perhaps, as he thought afterwards, to pass off Tom's want
of orthodoxy.

"I was a babbler then," said he to himself the next moment; "how much
better to have simply held my tongue!"

"Ah; yes; I know men have their secrets, as well as women," said
Valencia, for the mere love of saying something: but as she looked at
Vavasour, she saw an expression in his face which she had never seen
before. What was it?--All that one can picture for oneself branded into
the countenance of a man unable to repress the least emotion, who had
worked himself into