‘People will talk whether or no. The business in life of one half of the world is to criticise and misjudge the conduct of the other half. But have you ever reflected how little difference all this evil speaking makes in life? It cannot change a single element in nature. It can worry us into untimely graves, if we are foolish enough to be worried by it--it can divide man and wife, or father and son, if man or wife, or father or son, is idiotic enough to be influenced by the evil tongues of indifferent lookers on--but scandal cannot, of itself, make the slightest difference in us or in the world we inhabit. It cannot shorten our days or prevent the summer sun from shining upon us.’ ‘I am sure I don’t know what Miss Coyle will say,’ murmured Mrs. Dulcimer, plaintively. ‘Miss Coyle is not my bishop,’ retorted her husband, ‘and if she were I should not consult her as to my choice of guests.’ Bella went to the Water House next day. She found Beatrix prostrate with some kind of low fever, and light-headed. It was altogether a piteous spectacle, this lonely sick bed. Mr. Namby came in three times in the course of the day and evening, and was full of anxiety about his patient. He found Bella sitting quietly by the bedside, ready to assist the faithful maid-servant in nursing her mistress. Mrs. Peters, the fat housekeeper, came in every half-hour, and was miserable because her beef tea and calves’ foot jelly were not appreciated by the fever-parched invalid. Cyril’s name came more than once from those dry pale lips, while Bella sat by and listened. His desertion was evidently the blow that had struck home. ‘I’m afraid she’s heard some of the unkind gossip that’s been about, and that it has preyed upon her mind,’ said Mr. Namby, in a confidential chat with Miss Scratchell. ‘I can’t account for her illness in any other way. It’s all the mind. Mr. Dulcimer promises to carry her off to the Vicarage directly she is well enough to be moved. That will be a very good thing. Change--change of scene and surroundings will do a great deal.’ To Mr. Namby, whose horizon had for the last five-and-thirty years been bounded by the sulky ridge of the moor that shut in Little Yafford, a change from the Water House to the Vicarage seemed a grand thing. And if in the summer his patient could be taken to Scarborough or Harrogate, the cure ought to be complete. Mr. Namby never thought of prescribing the Tyrol or the Engadine. Those places had for him little more than a traditionary or geographical existence, and were only present in his mind as certain wavy lines upon the map. The days of Cook and Gaze, when even such persons as Mr. Namby may be personally conducted over the face of the Continent, were yet to come.