"Fiddlesticks!" growls Sir Thomas. "Tired! what the devil has she been doing to tire herself?--fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking off half a dozen dead roses. Very good thing for her if she is." But the man's will is stronger than the turkey-cock's, and the latter yields. CHAPTER XII. A sprained ankle takes mostly a tedious weary time in getting mended. Esther's, however, is but a slight sprain, and entails only a week's lying on a thoroughly comfortable, well-stuffed sofa close to one of the library's windows, where mignonette sends up continual presents of the strongest and sweetest of all flower-perfumes to her grateful nostrils--entails also being made a fuss with. If Miss Blessington had had her will, the sofa would have been upstairs, and the being made a fuss with, save by a compassionate lady's maid, dispensed with. Miss Blessington desires sincerely, in her affectionate solicitude for her welfare, to keep the young patient in a graceful and pleasing solitude upstairs. The young patient, being of a gregarious turn of mind, desires sincerely to be brought down: and the son of the house, although not particularly young, and in general not particularly gregarious, desires sincerely to bring her down. It is a case of Pull, Devil; Pull, Baker!--Baker being represented by Constance, Devil by St. John and Esther. But two pull stronger than one, and they gain their point. "Is Miss Craven ready to come down?" asks St. John, one morning, addressing the question to Miss Blessington as they stand together after breakfast. "I don't know, I'm sure. St. John?" "Well!" "If," she says, giving a little factitious cough, and speaking with her usual amiable smile, "it is any object to Miss Craven to get well----" "I should imagine that there could be no doubt on that point," he answers, picking up the _Pall Mall_. "I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve. "It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can 'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?" "No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you, with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel." "I _am_ wonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of the _Pall Mall_. "There is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is there?" She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her. "Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished, like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well'--what then?"