“I’ll make Mr Brown keep me in the house,” said Nancy, sitting down at a table piled with good things, and which looked an embodiment of kitchen luxury and comfort, “and get me a girl. It was what missis always meant to do. I’ll show it to him out of the will that I was left in trust to be made commforable. And in course of nature her things all comes to me. It’s a deal easier to deal with a single gentleman than if there was a lady poking her nose about into everything. Thank my stars, upstarts such like as them Christians shall never lord it over me; and now I have more of my own way, I’ll be glad to see you of an evening whenever you can commforable. Bring a bit of work, and we’ll have a quiet chat. I consider myself settled for life.” * * * * * The young surgeon’s house was at the other end of the town; it was close to a region of half-built streets--for Carlingford was a prosperous town--where successive colonies were settling, where houses were damp and drainage incomplete, and a good practice to be had with pains. The house had a genteel front to the road, a lamp over the door, and a little surgery round the corner, where it gave forth the sheen of its red and blue bottles across a whole half-finished district. Mr Rider had come home tired, unaccountably tired. He had kicked off one boot, and taken a cigar from his case and forgotten to light it. He sat plunged in his easy-chair in a drear brown study--a brown study inaccessible to the solaces which generally make such states of mind endurable. His cigar went astray among the confused properties of his writing-table; the book he had been reading last night lay rejected in the farthest corner of the room. He was insensible to the charms of dressing-gown and slippers. On the whole, he was in a very melancholy, sullen, not to say savage mood. He sat and gazed fiercely into the fire, chewing the cud of fancies, in which very little of the sweet seemed to mingle with the bitter. He had been the medical attendant of Mrs Thomson of Grove Street, and had assisted this afternoon at her funeral, and you might have supposed he had hastened the advent of that melancholy day, had you seen his face.