"Oh, Miss Grey!" I exclaimed. "You are far, far too kind. We--we don't--" how I longed to finish my sentence, "don't deserve it." But I dared not, for there flashed over me the remembrance that, if I confessed my own share in our impertinent intrusion, I should implicate Isabel, which I had no right whatever to do, and I stopped short. My tears, I think, standing me in good stead, as they gave a reason for my confusion, and increased the kind woman's pity. They were genuine enough, too, Heaven knows, for I had been putting considerable restraint on myself to keep them back hitherto, for every sake--Moore's especially. I felt Miss Grey's other hand steal on to the top of mine, already in her clasp. "My poor child," she said,--"excuse me for calling you so--do not take things so to heart, unless--unless, indeed, there is fresh cause for your distress?" and now her tone was full of anxiety. "I trust your brother is not worse? No injury to the head, or to the limbs, that did not show perhaps at first?" I shook my head, and now a silly feeling of wishing to laugh came over me, when I thought of the excellent breakfast I had seen the naughty boy upstairs despatching, and his very comfortable condition, propped up with a story-book, at the present moment. No, my tears were not those of anxiety about him, but of very sincere shame and distress at the trouble we had caused these good kind people, who surely had a right to shut themselves up in their own domain if they chose, without being subjected to inquisitive espionage. "Oh, no," I said at last, choking down my hysterical symptoms, "he is going on all right. In himself he is really very well indeed, and I _think_ his foot is improving. But you are standing all this time," and I drew forward a chair, Miss Beatrice Grey, who looked pale and nervous, having already sunk into a corner of a sofa. "Jessie," she now said, speaking for the first time, and addressing her sister, "you are forgetting the liniment." "By no means, my dear love," replied the elder one, "I am just coming to it," and from the folds of her mantle--a good but old-fashioned affair, as was every part of their attire--she produced a phial, neatly wrapped up, which she carefully unfolded. "This is a very excellent preparation," she continued, "for external application--_external_. If Dr Meeke has not called this morning, pray suggest it to him when he does so. He knows it of old, though probably he did not think of it in the present case. We distil it ourselves--my sister and I--not having"--here she coughed a little--that tiny cough was her only sign of nervousness--"as we have not," she resumed, "too much to do;" and here there came a little murmur about "a quiet country life," "we amuse ourselves with these sorts of things--distilling, and so on. We take a great interest in herbs, and we have some rare ones." She tapped the little bottle as she spoke.