"Thank you, my dear. Now I will go; for I see the doctor waiting to have a word with you." The company took their leave, and the doctor was not two minutes behind them; for as I went up to my room, after asking the curate when I might call upon him, I saw him come out of the drawing-room and go down stairs. "Monday evening, then," I had heard the colonel say, as he followed his guests to the hall. CHAPTER II. THE CURATE AND HIS WIFE. As I approached the door of the little house in which the curate had so lately taken up his abode, he saw me from the window, and before I had had time to knock, he had opened the door. "Come in," he said. "I saw you coming. Come to my den, and we will have a pipe together." "I have brought some of my favourite cigars," I said, "and I want you to try them." "With all my heart." The room to which he led me was small, but disfigured with no offensive tidiness. Not a spot of wall was to be seen for books, and yet there were not many books after all. We sat for some minutes enjoying the fragrance of the western incense, without other communion than that of the clouds we were blowing, and what I gathered from the walls. For I am old enough, as I have already confessed, to be getting long-sighted, and I made use of the gift in reading the names of the curate's books, as I had read those of his brother's. They were mostly books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a large admixture from the nineteenth, and more than the usual proportion of the German classics; though, strange to say, not a single volume of German Theology could I discover. The curate was the first to break the silence. "I find this a very painful cigar," he said, with a half laugh. "I am sorry you don't like it. Try another." "The cigar is magnificent." "Isn't it thoroughfare, then?" "Oh yes! the cigar's all right. I haven't smoked such a cigar for more than ten years; and that's the reason." "I wish I had known you seven years, Mr. Armstrong." "You have known me a hundred and seven." "Then I have a right to--" "Poke my fire as much as you please." And as Mr. Armstrong said so, he poked his own chest, to signify the symbolism of his words. "Then I should like to know something of your early history--something to account for the fact that a man like you, at your time of life, is only a curate." "I can do all that, and account for the pain your cigar gives me, in one and the same story." I sat full of expectation. "You won't find me long-winded, I hope." "No fear of that. Begin directly. I adjure you by our friendship of a hundred years."