The Reverend William Yorke had quitted the house, shaking the dust from his shoes in anger, as he crossed the threshold. Anger as much at himself, for having ever given her up, as at Constance Channing; and still most at the Right Honourable the Earl of Carrick. CHAPTER XLIV. -- MR. JENKINS IN A DILEMMA. I don’t know what you will say to me for introducing you into the privacy of Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins’s bed-chamber, but it is really necessary to do so. We cannot very well get on without it. A conjugal dispute had occurred that morning when Mrs. Jenkins got up. She was an early riser; as was Jenkins also, in a general way; but since his illness, he had barely contrived to come down in time for breakfast. On this morning--which was not the one following the application of mustard to his chest, but one about a week after that medicinal operation--Mrs. Jenkins, on preparing to descend, peremptorily ordered him to remain in bed. Nothing need be recorded of the past week, except two facts: Charles Channing had not been discovered, either in life or in death; and the Earl of Carrick had terminated his visit, and left Helstonleigh. “I’ll bring up your breakfast,” said Mrs. Jenkins. “It is of no use to say that,” Jenkins ventured meekly to remonstrate. “You know I must get up.” “I say you shall not get up. Here you are, growing weaker and worse every day, and yet you won’t take care of yourself! Where’s the use of your taking a bottle a-day of cough-mixture--where’s the use of your making the market scarce of cod-liver oil--where’s the use of wasting mustard, if it’s all to do you no good? _Does_ it do you any good?” “I am afraid it has not, as yet,” confessed Jenkins. “And never will, so long as you give your body and brains no rest. Out you go by nine o’clock, in all weathers, ill or well, and there you are at your business till evening; stooping yourself double over the writing, dancing abroad on errands, wearing out your lungs with answers to callers! There’s no sense in it.” “But, my dear, the office must be attended to,” said Jenkins, with much deference. “There’s no ‘must’ in the case, as far as you are concerned. If I say you shan’t go to it, why, you shan’t. What’s the office, pray, in comparison with a man’s life?” “But I am not so ill as to remain away. I can still go and do my work.” “You’d be for going, if you were in your coffin!” was Mrs. Jenkins’s wrathful answer. “Could you do any good then, pray?” “But I am not in my coffin,” mildly suggested Jenkins. “Don’t I say you’d go, if you were?” reiterated Mrs. Jenkins, who sometimes, in her heat, lost sight of the precise point under dispute. “You know you would! you know there’s nothing in the whole world that you think of, but that office! Office--office--office, it is with you from morning till night. When you _are_ in your coffin, through it, you’ll be satisfied.” “But it is my duty to go as long as I can, my dear.”