when one's house is in a muddle; walking about, and making impossible
suggestions in quaint academic phrases till your flesh creeps and you
wish them dead. Do you take sugar?"

Mr. Maybold was at this instant seen coming up the path.

"There! That's he coming! How I wish you were not here!--that is, how
awkward--dear, dear!" she exclaimed, with a quick ascent of blood to her
face, and irritated with Dick rather than the vicar, as it seemed.

"Pray don't be alarmed on my account, Miss Day--good-afternoon!" said
Dick in a huff, putting on his hat, and leaving the room hastily by the
back-door.

The horse was caught and put in, and on mounting the shafts to start he
saw through the window the vicar, standing upon some books piled in a
chair, and driving a nail into the wall; Fancy, with a demure glance,
holding the canary-cage up to him, as if she had never in her life
thought of anything but vicars and canaries.



CHAPTER VIII: DICK MEETS HIS FATHER


For several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with the inner eye of
reflection so anxiously set on his passages at arms with Fancy, that the
road and scenery were as a thin mist over the real pictures of his mind.
Was she a coquette? The balance between the evidence that she did love
him and that she did not was so nicely struck, that his opinion had no