'No, indeed! Leave Bethia to me. I hope you won't say another word to
her while she is here. I shall see that she gets a respectable place
when she goes away.'

Then Mr. Gibson rang for his horse, and went out on the last visits of
the day. He used to reckon that he rode the world around in the course
of the year. There were not many surgeons in the county who had so wide
a range of practice as he; he went to lonely cottages on the borders of
great commons; to farm-houses at the end of narrow country lanes that
led to nowhere else, and were overshadowed by the elms and beeches
overhead. He attended all the gentry within a circle of fifteen miles
round Hollingford; and was the appointed doctor to the still greater
families who went up to London every February--as the fashion then was--
and returned to their acres in the early weeks of July. He was, of
necessity, a great deal from home, and on this soft and pleasant summer
evening he felt the absence as a great evil. He was startled into
discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman, and
already the passive object of some of the strong interests that affect
a woman's life; and he--her mother as well as her father--so much away
that he could not guard her as he would have wished. The end of his
cogitations was that ride to Hamley the next morning, when he proposed
to allow his daughter to accept Mrs. Hamley's last invitation--an
invitation that had been declined at the time.

'You may quote against me the proverb, "He that will not when he may,
when he will he shall have nay." And I shall have no reason to
complain,' he had said.

But Mrs. Hamley was only too much charmed with the prospect of having a