He lay back on his pillow and solaced himself by thinking all manner of good of the men who had just left. The poor, the lower classes, who are thought so gross and rude in their perceptions! What people could have shown a more delicate intuition of what would be grateful to him in his weakness, than those rough-spoken, hard-handed men? He had been vexing himself with thoughts of their indifference and neglect, during his illness, but see how considerate and forbearing they had been this evening, notwithstanding the well known crotchets of this one and that, which would certainly have been brought out on any other occasion. It was a beautiful thought, though not, in the circumstances a very accurate one, and helped him much in dropping peacefully to sleep not long after. CHAPTER XXI. _CIRCE_. On Monday morning Mr. Wallowby was the first to appear in the breakfast-room,--an unusual circumstance. There was meditation in the noiseless tread of his slippered feet, and he rubbed his hands thoughtfully, one over the other. So, a reflective cat will softly move her paws and undulate her tail, while she is planning her next raid on a neighbouring mouse hole. His enquiries after Peter's health were solicitous and tender, and the regret and disappointment at his being still confined to his room, perhaps excessive, considering his strong recommendations over-night, that the patient should keep his bed altogether next day, and, by making a regular lay up of it, get well the sooner. He asked Mr. Sangster to lend him a horse and trap to drive over to Inchbracken, still lamenting Peter's indisposition and deploring the necessity of having to go alone, but persistently deaf to the suggestion that he should wait a day or two till Peter got better. The trap was ordered round as desired, the old gentleman being thankful that in default of Peter's help the guest should take his amusement into his own hands, and not fall back on him, James Sangster, who had been resignedly counting on a day of self-sacrifice and boredom in the young man's company. He would have yielded the day freely enough, and submitted to the boredom with a fair grace, but he feared the young man would be as much bored as himself; and that, somehow, he did not relish. We are all of us so accustomed to being bored by our fellows, that none but the very young think of complaining, but that our fellows might be bored with us, is a suggestion our self-love would rather not entertain. Mrs. Sangster did not approve the idea; she would have had Peter go to consolidate his intimacy with the county magnates, and what could it possibly matter to Wallowby? she thought. She proposed a postponement, but Wallowby was already deep in a discussion of the relative merits of Hungarian rye-grass and timothy with her spouse, and so continued not to hear.