The Rectory adieux to the newly found hero are made much earlier than his votaries think at all necessary or desirable. But though a few moments before Lavinia’s entry, he had stoutly denied the accusation of fatigue and the offer of departure, a quarter of an hour later he tamely acquiesces in both. “You will come again soon, and bring the Siege Train,” he says at parting, and with something that might be compunctious in his tone, to the disappointed children; “and I’ll tell you all I know about Bobs. I do not think it is nearly as much as you know yourselves,” he adds laughing. He shakes hands with Phillida and Daphne, and kisses Serena and the poodle--the latter by request--and they are gone. Strong emotion is often the unexpected parent of platitude. It is the mind at ease that has leisure to sharpen the epigram and fire the _bon-mot_, and nothing can be more banal than the short phrases exchanged between the young pair whom the departure of the Darcys has left quivering and tingling with a sense of each other’s proximity. “What capital children!” “Yes, aren’t they?” “And she, the mother, is one of the best, isn’t she?” “Yes, she is.” A pause. Lavinia can go no farther than this bald assent in praise of her chosen friend, for the oppression of shyness that crushes and gags her. It is of this metamorphosed, dressed, transformed man, passing so visibly out of the province of the nurse, despite his crutches and his pallor, that she feels a timidity none the less overmastering for her knowledge of its senselessness. That he sees it, the uncertainty of the tone which utters what sounds like a reproach sufficiently proves. “Why were you so unwilling to own that you knew my Christian names? It was not a very compromising admission.” “Not very,” she answers with a wavering laugh; “but to-day I feel as if I must sit up, and ‘make strange’ with you. The person _I_ knew lay meekly flat on his back, and did not dare to call his soul his own; when he sits up and gives a party, I realize that my jurisdiction has ended.” “_Has_ it?” The question is followed by a silence so full of electricity that both feel the necessity of running up a lightning conductor. Both begin a sentence at the same moment, and each breaks it off on realizing the other’s intention. Each begs the other to continue the interrupted phrase, and each asseverates that it was not worth ending. It is Binning who is finally persuaded to reissue from his mint the coin whose valuelessness he has spent so much breath in asserting. “I was only going to say that if I have already become such a bogey--so unrecognizable--when once I am on my legs again, I shall have to be formally reintroduced to you.”