“Oh, the most horrid! He says that Captain Baker has several times had a dreadful disease brought on by drinking, and that he is mad when he has it. He has delusions, sees demons, when he is in this state—wants to be watched.” “Drencher tells you everything.” She says meekly: “He attends us when we are ill.” I remark, with fine irony: “He attends the whole family: he is always coming to Shrublands!” “He comes very often,” Miss Prior says, gravely. “And do you mean to say, Bessy,” I cry, madly cutting off two or three heads of yellow broom with my stick—“do you mean to say a fellow like that, who drops his _h_’s about the room, is a welcome visitor?” “I should be very ungrateful if he were not welcome, Mr. Batchelor,” says Miss Prior. “And call me by my surname, please—and he has taken care of all my family—and——” “And of course, of course, of course, Miss Prior!” say I, brutally; “and this is the way the world wags; and this is the way we are ill, and are cured; and we are grateful to the doctor that cures us!” She nods her grave head. “You used to be kinder to me once, Mr. Batchelor, in old days—in your—in my time of trouble! Yes, my dear, that is a beautiful bit of broom! Oh, what a fine butterfly!” (Cecilia scours the plain after the butterfly.) “You used to be kinder to me once—when we were both unhappy.” “I was unhappy,” I say, “but I survived. I was ill, but I am now pretty well, thank you. I was jilted by a false, heartless woman. Do you suppose there are no other heartless women in the world?” And I am confident, if Bessy’s breast had not been steel, the daggers which darted out from my eyes would have bored frightful stabs in it. But she shook her head, and looked at me so sadly that my eye-daggers tumbled down to the ground at once; for you see, though I am a jealous Turk, I am a very easily appeased jealous Turk; and if I had been Bluebeard, and my wife, just as I was going to decapitate her, had lifted up her head from the block and cried a little, I should have dropped my scimitar, and said, “Come, come, Fatima, never mind for the present about that key and closet business, and I’ll chop your head off some other morning.” I say, Bessy disarmed me. Pooh! I say. Women will make a fool of me to the end. Ah! ye gracious Fates! Cut my thread of life ere it grow too long. Suppose I were to live till seventy, and some little wretch of a woman were to set her cap at me? She would catch me—I know she would. All the males of our family have been spoony and soft, to a degree perfectly ludicrous and despicable to contemplate——Well, Bessy Prior, putting a hand out, looked at me, and said,— “You are the oldest and best friend I have ever had, Mr. Batchelor—the only friend.” “Am I, Elizabeth?” I gasp, with a beating heart.