Mrs. Dulcimer would not have been quite so satisfied with the result of her good-natured manœuvring, could she have seen the figure lying prone upon the floor of Bella Scratchell’s barely-furnished bedroom--the dishevelled hair--the clenched hands--the convulsed movements of the thin bloodless lips: and, perhaps, she might have been for ever cured of her passion for match-making, could she have heard the curses which those pallid lips called down upon her matronly head. CHAPTER XV. MR. NAMBY’S PRESCRIPTION. IN the dark days of December, Mr. Namby, the family practitioner and parish doctor of Little Yafford, was agreeably surprised by a summons to the Water House. His patients there had been inconveniently well for the greater part of the year, and he had been looking somewhat dolefully at the blank leaf in his diary which told him that he should have no account worth speaking of to send in to Mr. Harefield at Christmas. He was much too benevolent a man to desire the misfortune of his fellow creatures; but he thought that those favoured ones of this world, whom Providence has exempted from all the cares of the impecunious majority, ought at least to be troubled with such small nervous disorders as would keep the faculty employed. An obscure case of hysteria, now, was the sort of thing one might look for at the Water House, and which, without doing vital harm to the patient, would necessitate a great many attendances from the doctor. He plucked up his spirits, therefore, and decapitated his breakfast egg with an unusual air of sprightliness, on hearing that James from the Water House had just called, to request that Mr. Namby would be so good as to look in to see Miss Harefield, during his morning round. ‘Poor girl! neuralgic, I daresay,’ he murmured cheerfully. ‘The Water House must be damp, but of course one cannot say anything to frighten away patients. She is a sweet girl. I shall try the new treatment.’ ‘If it’s the stuff you gave me, William, it made me worse,’ said Mrs. Namby. ‘Nothing did me so much good as that cask of double stout you ordered from the brewer at Great Yafford.’ Mr. Namby’s countenance expressed ineffable disgust. ‘Do you think your constitution would have been in a condition to profit by that stout if I had not prescribed the new treatment for you first?’ he exclaimed, and Mrs. Namby, being a wise little woman, went on cutting bread and butter for her children in a sagacious silence. Mr. Namby was shown straight to the study, where Miss Harefield was accustomed to read history and other erudite works to her governess. The histories were all dull old fashioned chronicles, which had been religiously believed when Miss Scales was a little girl, but whereof most of the facts had faded into mere phantasmagoria, before the fierce light of nineteenth century research, and the revelations of the Record Office.