IT could hardly be expected that my Uncle Corny should grow very miserable about this matter. He knew that young people of the ordinary cast tumble into love and tumble out again, with perhaps a little running of the eyes and nose, and a hat crushed on the head, or a ribbon saturated; but nothing that penetrates the skin, far less puts a “tub of clothes,” as Mrs. Wilcox said, into the lungs. And it would not have been reasonable to demand of him, that he should believe in any grand distinction between the case of Kitty and myself, and that of any other couple he might come across, in a life whose main nucleus was Covent Garden. That which chiefly moved him, as he told me in the end, and as I might have known without his telling, was the iron sense of justice, gilded haply at the corners, and crowned with a little touch of chivalry. To his sturdy sense of right it seemed a monstrous thing, that an innocent girl, and such a lovely girl, should be locked away from all who were longing to help her, and left at the mercy of two bad men. Therefore he donned his Sunday clothes, though he grumbled a good deal at having to do it, and without a word to me, put old _Spanker_ in the shafts, and drove away alone in the green spring-cart, with a face which made all the village say to one another, that he must have a County-court job on his hands. Dr. Sippets, who came to see me every day, had by this time supplied such a row of medicine-bottles, that we glazed a new wall with them forty yards long, for he would not allow a farthing on their return, though he put them in the bill at twopence halfpenny apiece; and that glazing brought him even more than that much again, from the number of boys’ fingers which he had to dress. For he was a skilful, as well as zealous man, and did his utmost for his patients and his family. He had now begun to “exhibit” mustard oil externally, as well as zinc, and especially sulphur inside; till the sulphur began to ooze through my pores, as if I had been a tea rose suffering from mildew. Then Tabby had to rub me with the mustard oil; and the more I groaned, the surer she became of its effect. With this vigorous treatment I began to rally, and even heard Uncle Corny depart, and contrived to steal a peep at him behind the window curtain. But they told me some fib about his errand. When he put up his horse, somewhere near Holland Park, he had not far to walk to find Mrs. Wilcox, who received him with great cordiality. And she sent her little Ted, who proved to be the very boy that had guided me among the brickfields, with a note which he managed to convey to Miss Fairthorn. “Rumpus going on,” he said when he came back; “they makes more rumpus in that house, than a score of navvies over one red herring. But cooky’s not a bad sort; she’ll give it to her.”