"Oliver? Then you're already acquainted with him?" The doctor felt beside himself with vexation. He was a man of feuds, and to him the land agent, all the more so that he was a highly educated man, who had been a civil servant, and later, for a brief period of glory, a member of Parliament, was a very real thorn in the flesh. But Barbara was laughing, really laughing, and for the first time since her arrival at Chancton. "If I were acquainted with him," she cried, "surely I should not be calling him by his Christian name! But of course his sister, Mrs. Johnstone, has talked to me of him: he is her only brother, and she thinks him quite perfect." "It's well there are two to think him so! I refer, o' course, Ma'am, to the youth himself, and to this lady who is a friend of yours." "Is he conceited? Oh! what a pity!" "Conceited?" Doctor McKirdy prided himself on his sense of strict justice and probity: "Nay, nay, that's no' the word for it. Mr. Oliver Boringdon just considers that he is always right, and that such a good thinker as himself can never be wrong. He's encouraged in his ideas by the silly women about here." "Does my godmother like him?--he's her land-agent, isn't he?" "Madam!" cried Doctor McKirdy indignantly, "Madam has never wasted a thought upon him,--why should she?" He looked quite angrily at his companion. Barbara was still smiling: a delicate colour, the effect of walking against the wind, had come into her face. "They're all alike," growled the doctor to himself, "just mention a young man to a young woman and smiling begins," but the harsh judgment, like most harsh judgments, was singularly at fault. Poor Barbara was waking up to life again, ready to take pleasure in the slightest matter which touched her sense of humour. The doctor, however, had become seriously uneasy. Why this strange interest in the Boringdons? Mrs. Rebell now belonged to the Priory, and so was surely bound to adopt without question all his, Alexander McKirdy's, views and prejudices. Her next words fortunately gave him the opening he sought. "I suppose there are many young ladies at Chancton?" "There is just one," he said, brightening, "a fine upstanding lass. The father of her is General Thomas Kemp. May-be you've heard of him, for he's quite a hero, Victoria Cross and a' that, though the fools about here don't recognise him as such." "No," said Barbara, "I never heard of the heroic General Kemp."