‘Not come back yet a family man, Mr. Oliver? Not wholly without its advantage—I mean the bachelor state. Mind coming in farther? Bless you! _don’t_ you mind? It will do Mrs. Dadd a power of good to see a strange face—as ain’t really strange—quite the contrary, and ain’t the doctor’s or one of them dratted nurses—which they never keep their time nor do their dooty properly, as the poor fellow needing them knows to his cost. His mother can’t watch day and night for weeks, and I’m but a poor hand at the trade,’ said the father wistfully, ‘though I would give a deal to take it up off-hand. But, you see, it don’t come natural like to a man as it do to a woman, and I wasn’t bred to it, in any sort, being come of a healthy family,’ rambled the linen-draper, staving off questions, as Oliver suspected, till they were through the back shop, up the stair and into the vacant, dreary-looking best parlour, with its torn prescriptions cast heedlessly on the carpet and its tray of half-empty physic-bottles and slops put down recklessly on the edge of the table, where guests had been wont to see more substantial fare carefully deposited. Then old Dadd raised his fist and was about to bring it down on the table with a bang—which in the very act of being dealt, was caught up and so much suppressed that it barely caused the physic-bottles to jingle, because Jack’s bedroom lay no farther off than the other side of the passage. ‘Yes, sir, my boy Jack is swimming for his life, they tell me,’ said the poor man, winking his eyes, knitting his brows hard, and speaking as if Oliver were about to question the statement. The door behind them opened, and the unnaturally pitched voice sank into silence abruptly, while the late speaker turned eagerly to meet the new comer. Mrs. Dadd had thought Oliver was the doctor, and entered hastily. At the sudden sight of her son’s contemporary and old companion standing there in the flush of health and strength, she broke down, for a moment, more completely than Dadd had done, to his great dismay. For Mrs. Dadd was a mannerly woman—so far as she understood manners. She prided herself on being at home with sickness, and she was accustomed to say, she did not know what a woman was good for, unless it were to bear up on these occasions when a man was sure to give way. One gain that was got by her sinking into a chair and covering her face, in place of greeting Oliver, was that it roused old Dadd to bustle about in order to quiet her, and to seek to explain the strange state of matters to Oliver.