Yes, it was pleasant to have won some appreciation—however little deserved—from his fellow-townsmen, who ought to know him best, to be assured that they gave him credit, after all, for meaning well. The nature of the acknowledgment touched and softened Oliver more than he could express. He wished his father and Fan might know it. As he went out into the streets afterwards, he was sensible of breathing another air, of his face being irradiated with a different light. He was no longer surprised that he encountered so many friends, and that they were all so friendly. Of course they must see he felt that everybody was almost intolerably kind, till he could have wished they would not come round a beggar so, and demoralise him with their kindness. ‘Do they believe in me now?’ Oliver was saying to himself, half sadly, in the midst of his gladness, half incredulously still. Oliver’s feet, like fate, at this crisis, carried him in the direction of the Meadows. All danger of infection from Jack Dadd’s fever was over, and nothing could be more salutary for the reformer, to prevent his losing his head altogether, than the cold douche of Mrs. Hilliard’s laughter, and Catherine’s indifference, in contradiction to the absurd excitement of the rest of the inhabitants of Friarton. But the instant he was shown into the Meadows’ drawing-room—cheery even on a November day, Oliver discovered that the antidote he was seeking was useless, or rather that there was no such corrective. The town’s dilatory admiration and gratitude were there before him, in all the excess in which they might be expected from women. Mrs. Hilliard’s inveterate jests sounded very much as if they were uttered to save herself from breaking down, and her jolly voice grew shaky when she asked after Fan’s baby. With regard to Catherine, she might still have been silent and stiff, had she not been penetrated, stirred to the depths of her nature, and spurred on by a full share of the public feeling. So much so, that when they were giving Oliver tea and he had cunningly worked round the conversation to a neutral topic—the new orders of nurses and the new theories of nursing—Catherine, her pale eager face, and eyes alight and aglow, with an expression which had all at once acquired a certain likeness to Fan’s, suddenly turned round on him and told him barefacedly, with the clearest personal application—Sister Elizabeth’s opinion was that her own work was good, but it was a better and nobler work to prevent the evils which took such costly sacrifices to cure them. When a man stood to his post, laboured to clear away his share of the abuses which had crept into all trades, and called nothing common and unclean—that was preventing great and widespread evils. ‘Oh, Gemini!’ groaned Oliver, gathering up his long legs in a marvellous coil which would have done credit to the brothers Davenport, ‘don’t you two go in with the others to make a fool and a hero of me!’