However, just the next day after I had spoken to Carson, Dr. Roberts called. Dr. Roberts was our rector; not a relation, but a kind of family connection, somehow, I really could not tell how. For three or four generations, at least, a Roberts had held our family living. There were so few of us Mortimers, as I have already explained, that the living could never be of any use to us; and our great-great-grandfathers had happened to be intimate, and so it came about that the living was as much an hereditary thing to the Robertses as our property was to us. Dr. Roberts was the best of good, easy, quiet men. He preached us a nice little sermon every Sunday. He would dine with the people who were in a condition to ask him, and make himself as agreeable as possible. He patted the children on the head, and wondered how it was that he had forgotten their names. Of course he had his own way of doing most things, and seldom varied; but then one could always calculate on what he would do and say, and wasn’t that a comfort? On the whole, he was the most excellent, good drowse of a man I ever knew. He led a very quiet life, with little interruption, except when, now and then, a storm seized upon him, in the shape of a new curate with advanced ideas. In such cases Dr. Roberts generally bowed to the tempest till its force was exhausted. He laughed in his quiet way at the young men. “They are all for making a fuss when they begin,” he said to me, confidentially; “but depend upon it, when they come to our age, Miss Milly, they’ll find the advantage of just getting along.” That was his favourite mode of progress. He was too stout and easy to make much haste. He loved to get along quietly; and really, as ours was a small parish, and nothing particular to make a commotion about, I don’t suppose there was much harm done. But only to think of Dr. Roberts becoming one of my assailants! I never could have expected any such thing. He came in, bringing some books from Miss Kate, who was as unlike him as possible. She was very active in the parish, and had something to do, with or for, everybody. She was rather Low-Church, and sent us books to read, to do us good, which, for my part, I always read faithfully, being very willing to have good done me, as far as it was practicable. Dr. Roberts sat down with a little sigh in the round easy chair, his particular chair, which Ellis wheeled out for him; not with a sentimental sigh, good man; but the road to the Park ascends a little, and the doctor, for the same reason as Hamlet, was a little scant of breath.