'Indeed, Arnold, their conduct is most exemplary. Neither Cardie nor Roy ever seem to let you go out alone.' 'Ay, ay,' he muttered; 'his mother was right. The lad is beyond his years, and has a wise head on young shoulders. Heriot tells me I must be looking out for a curate. I had some notion of waiting for Richard, but he will have it the work is beyond me.' Mildred was silent. She thought any work, however exhausting, was better than the long lonely hours passed in the study--hours during which his children were denied admittance, and for which all Richard's mannishness was not allowed to find a remedy; and yet, as she looked at the wan, thin face, and weary stoop of the figure, might it not be that Dr. Heriot was right? 'Heriot has heard of some one at Durham who is likely to suit me, he thinks; he wants me to have him down. By the bye, Mildred, how do you get on with Heriot?' 'He is very nice,' she returned, vaguely, rather taken aback by the suddenness of the question. 'Such a general favourite could not fail to please,' she continued, a little mischievously. 'Ah, you are laughing at us. Well, Heriot is our weak point, I confess. Cardie is not given to raptures, but he has not a word to say against him, and Trelawny is always having him up at Kirkleatham. Kirkby Stephen could not do without Heriot now.' 'He is clever in his profession, then?' 'Very. And then so thoroughly unselfish; he would go twenty miles to do any one a service, and take as much pains to hide it afterwards. I shall be disappointed, indeed Mildred, if you and he do not become good friends.' 'Dear Arnold, he is a perfect stranger to me yet. I like him quite well enough to wish to see more of him. There seems some mystery about him,' she continued, hesitating; for Mildred, honest and straightforward by nature, was a foe to all mysteries. 'Only the mystery of a disappointed life. He has no secrets with us--he never had. We knew him when we lived at Lambeth, and even then his story was well known to us.' 'Betha told me he had given up a large West End practice in consequence of severe domestic trouble. She hinted once that he had a bad wife.' 'She was hardly deserving of the name. I have heard that she was nine years older than he, and a great beauty; a woman, too, of marvellous fascination, and gifted beyond the generality of her sex, and that he was madly in love when he married her.' 'Perhaps the love was only on his side?'