But in Cheltenham Linda might have hunted! Quite early after their return to Europe Doctor Thorne made the discovery that he and his wife had two passions--Linda’s for horses, his own for living within his pension. This decided him on choosing an island for his residence. ‘Bless my heart, Linda! A positively unexpected pleasure,’ repeated the Doctor, with urbane little bows discreetly given to no person in particular. ‘You dear, delicious Robbie, to turn up just when you are _so_ wanted!’ cried Linda. ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot, let me introduce my husband.’ With a careless wave of the hand that said, plainly enough, this part of the ceremony might be cut as short as possible. ‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot. Have I not often told you, Robbie, of my old friendship for Gast--, I mean, for Mr. Arbuthnot, in Paris? Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, a medical student from Cambridge.’ Doctor Thorne was one of the most thorough believers extant in this questioning, sceptical nineteenth-century world. He believed in his own drugs, practising, on a small but murderous scale, here in Guernsey, and holding the same pharmacopœial opinions that obtained half a century earlier in Calcutta. He believed in the great political names he had admired when he was a schoolboy; in the balance of power; in the infallibility of Church, State, and the British Empire generally. He believed in the extraordinary convenience of his house, in the fitness of his furniture, in the talents of his Linda. Doctor Thorne, I should add, had a mind--curiously small, thoroughly limited, but still a mind--not badly stored with facts, of a dry and statistical order, which he loved to impart to others. Fastening at once on Dinah--for Linda, moving a few paces distant, began to lionise the adjacent islands for Gaston’s benefit, and Geff contrived to vanish from the scene--fastening on poor Dinah for his victim, Doctor Thorne at once opened a conversation with the airy didactic grace in which old gentlemen would seem to have shone when the story-books of our infancy were written. ‘Your first visit to the island, Mrs. Arbuthnot I Then I trust you and your worthy husband will accept my services as your cicerone. There is much here, I can assure you, to stimulate the interest and foster habits of observation. In the first place, you see, we have the people themselves, whose habits of frugality contrast in a marked and favourable manner with those of larger countries. You are not perhaps acquainted with the statistics of savings-banks generally?’ ‘I have never had anything to save in my life, sir.’ ‘Well, then, I can give you a few important facts. Sit down, pray. Let us protect our heads under the shadow of this delightful ash, or lime, which is it? I can give you a few details, with the amount actually saved by each person in this island over the age of fifteen. Studies of this kind captivate the softer faculty of benevolence, while they strengthen and enlarge the understanding.’