Instantly the expression of Dora's face changed. She rose and went towards him, smiling contemptuously towards his lowering gravity. He looked up, gave a little grunt of recognition, and closed his book. “Father,” she said, “I've just heard a piece of news.” “Bad, I suppose.” She laughed. “Well,” she answered, “I suppose we shall survive it. Jem has got his commission, in a Goorkha regiment.” “Goorkha regiment? Nonsense!” “Aunt Anna has just told me so. She is very pleased, and seems prepared for the--best.” “That is the custom of fools, to be prepared for the best--only.” The Rector gave a despairing shrug of the shoulders. He was a man who allowed himself, after the manner of the ancients with whom he lived mentally, a few gestures. He smoked a very expressive cigarette. He was smoking one at this moment, and threw it away half consumed. This divine was possessed of a rooted conviction that the Almighty made a great mistake whenever He invested temporal power in a woman, whom he was ungallantly inclined to classify under a celebrated dictum of Mr. Carlyle's respecting the population of these happy Isles, who, truth to tell, care not one jot what Mr. Carlyle may think of them. The Reverend Thomas Glynde and his daughter walked all the way home without exchanging another word. In the Rectory drawing-room they found Mrs. Glynde, small, nervous, worried. She had evidently devoted considerable thought and attention to the preservation of the hot buttered toast. Poor humble little soul, she was quite content to minister to the bodily requirements of her spouse, having long been convinced of the inferiority of her own sex in every respect except a certain limited knowledge of housekeeping matters. She was vaguely conscious of inferiority to Dora from a literary point of view, and talked with abject humility to her own daughter of all things appertaining to books. But on all other points connected with the child of her old age this quiet little woman was absolute mistress. Years before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken East Burgen doctor put it, made an ass of himself on the matter of a childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora's half-fledged little life. Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time forth the Rector was allowed to hold forth on symptoms to his heart's content, to take down from his library shelf a stout misguided book of medical short-cuts to the grave, but nothing more. He never referred to the asinine business, and in the course of years he forgave the doctor (having in view the fact that that practitioner had been carried away by a right and proper sense of the importance of the case), but he tacitly acknowledged that in the practice of home-administered medical assistance, his knowledge was second to a mother's instinct.