"Dear Marion, read no more to-night," said Grace--for she was weeping.
"I cannot," she replied, and closed the book. "The words seem all on fire!"
The Doctor was amused at this; and laughed as he patted her on the head.
"What! overcome by a story-book!" said Doctor Jeddler. "Print and paper! Well, well, it's all one. It's as rational to make a serious matter of print and paper as of anything else. But dry your eyes, love, dry your eyes. I dare say the heroine has got home again long ago, and made it up all round--and if she hasn't, a real home is only four walls; and a fictitious one, mere rags and ink. What's the matter now?"
"It's only me, Mister," said Clemency, putting in her head at the door.
"And what's the matter with _you_?" said the Doctor.
"Oh, bless you, nothing an't the matter with me," returned Clemency--and truly too, to judge from her well-soaped face, in which there gleamed as usual the very soul of good humour, which, ungainly as she was, made her quite engaging. Abrasions on the elbows are not generally understood, it is true, to range within that class of personal charms called beauty-spots. But it is better, going through the world, to have the arms chafed in that narrow passage, than the temper: and Clemency's was sound and whole as any beauty's in the land.
"Nothing an't the matter with me," said Clemency, entering, "but--come a little closer, Mister."
The Doctor, in some astonishment, complied with this invitation.
"You said I wasn't to give you one before them, you know," said Clemency.
A novice in the family might have supposed, from her extraordinary ogling as she said it, as well as from a singular rapture or ecstasy which pervaded her elbows, as if she were embracing herself, that 'one,' in its most favorable interpretation, meant a chaste salute. Indeed the Doctor himself seemed alarmed, for the moment; but quickly regained his composure, as Clemency, having had recourse to both her pockets--beginning with the right one, going away to the wrong one, and afterwards coming back to the right one again--produced a letter from the Post-office.
"Britain was riding by on a errand," she chuckled, handing it to the Doctor, "and see the Mail come in, and waited for it. There's A. H. in the corner. Mr. Alfred's on his journey home, I bet. We shall have a wedding in the house--there was two spoons in my saucer this morning. Oh Luck, how slow he opens it!"