"And now tell me, how is my dear Miss Thornycroft?" cried Mrs. Macpherson, as the good professor, in his threadbare coat (rather worse than usual) beguiled Isaac away to his laboratory. "I declare I have not yet asked after her." "Had Mrs. Macpherson been strictly candid, she might have acknowledged to having purposely abstained from asking before Isaac. The fact of the young lady's having got intimate with Robert Hunter at _her_ house, and of its being an acquaintance not likely, as she judged, to be acceptable to the Thornycrofts, had rather lain on her mind. "She looks wretched," answered Mrs. Copp. "Wretched?" "She has fretted all the flesh off her bones. You might draw her through the eye of a needle." "My patience!" ejaculated Mrs. Macpherson. "The prefessor 'ill be sorry to hear this. What on earth has she fretted over?" "That horrible business about Robert Hunter," explained Mrs. Copp. "The justice has not looked like himself since; and never will again." "Oh," returned the professor's lady in a subdued tone, feeling suddenly crestfallen. Conscience whispered that this could only apply to the matter she was thinking of, and that the attachment had arisen through her own imprudence in allowing them to meet. She supposed (to use the expressive words passing through her thoughts) that there had been a blow-up. "It wasn't no fault of mine," she said, after a pause. "Who was to suspect they were going to fall in love with each other in that foolish fashion? She a schoolgirl, and he an old widower! A couple of spoonies! Other folks as well as me might have been throwed off their guard." Since Mrs. Macpherson had mixed in refined society she had learnt to speak tolerably well at collected times and seasons. But when flurried her new ideas and associations forsook her, and she was sure to lapse back to the speech of old days. "Then there _was_ an attachment between him and Mary Anne Thornycroft!" exclaimed Mrs. Copp, in a tone of triumph. "Didn't I tell you so, Anna? You need not have been so close about it." "I do not know that there was," replied Anna "Mary Anne never spoke of it to me." "Rubbish to speaking of it," said Mrs. Copp. "You didn't speak about you and Mr. Isaac." Anna bent her head in silence. "And was there a blow-up with her folks?" inquired Mrs. Macpherson, not quite courageously yet. "Miss Jupp! _you_ remember--I come right off to you with my suspicions at the first moment I had 'em--which was only a day or so before she went home." "I don't know about that; there might have been or there might not," replied Mrs. Copp, alluding to the question of the "blow-up." "But I have got my eyes about me, and I can see how she grieved after him. Why, if there had been nothing between them, why did she put on mourning?" demanded the captain's mother, looking at the assembled company one by one. "She put it on for Lady Ellis," said Anna.