‘I have a friend who looks after anything serious,’ said Gerard dubiously. ‘If I were to follow my own inclination I should most assuredly stay.’ ‘Then follow it,’ cried Celia. ‘I always do. Mamma, give Mr. Gerard some bacon and potatoes, while I run and tell Peter to go to the George, and let them know that the omnibus need not call here.’ ‘I am afraid I am imposing upon your kind hospitality, and giving you a great deal of trouble,’ said Gerard, when Celia had slipped out of the room to give her orders. ‘You are giving us no trouble; and you must know that I should be happy to receive any friend of my son’s.’ Gerard’s sallow cheek flushed faintly at this speech. He felt that there was a kind of imposture in his position at the Vicarage. Every one insisted upon regarding him as an intimate friend of Edward Clare; and already it had been made clear to him that Edward was a man whom he could never make his friend. But for Edward Clare’s mother and sister he had a much more cordial feeling. He sat down to breakfast with the two ladies. The Vicar would breakfast later, and one of Edward’s privileges as a poet of the future was to lie in bed until ten o’clock every morning in the present. Never, perhaps, was a merrier breakfast eaten. Gerard, having made up his mind to stay, abandoned himself unreservedly to the pleasure of the moment. Celia questioned him about his life, and drew from him a lively description of some of the more curious incidents in his career. He had but rarely joined in the wilder amusements of his fellow students, but he had joined them often enough to see all that was strange and interesting in London life. Celia listened open-eyed, with rosy lips apart in wonder. ‘Ah, that is what I call living,’ she exclaimed. ‘How different from our system of vegetation here. I’m sure if Harvey had lived all his life at Hazlehurst he would never have found out anything about the circulation of the blood. I don’t believe ours does circulate.’ ‘If you could only know how sweet your rural stagnation seems to a dweller in cities,’ said Gerard. ‘Let the dweller in cities try it for a month or six weeks,’ said Celia. ‘He will be weary enough by the end of that time; unless he is one of those sporting creatures who are always happy as long as they can go about with a gun or a fishing rod murdering something.’ ‘I should want neither gun nor rod,’ said Gerard. ‘I think I could find complete happiness among these hills.’ ‘What, away from all your hospitals?’ ‘I am speaking of my holiday life. I could not afford to live always away from the hospitals. I have to learn my profession.’ ‘I thought you had done with all that when you passed your examination.’ ‘A medical man has never done learning. Medical science is progressive. The tyro of to-day knows more than the adept of a century ago.’