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 favourable interpretation, meant a
chaste salute. Indeed the Doctor himself seemed alarmed, for the