"But he gets plenty of crumbs," I said soothingly, "and it is a nice aquarium with fresh water running through all the time. I think he is a very lucky goldfish." She looked fixedly at me, and the faint colour in her cheeks faded, the imploring look vanished from her eyes. She leaned back among her lace pillows. "That is what Mrs. Robinson says," she said with a quivering lip, and I perceived that I was relegated to the same category in her mind as her mother-in-law. She withdrew her thin hand and retreated once more behind the frail bastion of silence from which she had looked out at me for all these months; from which she had for one moment emerged, only to creep back to its forlorn shelter. A few days later Mrs. Robinson was convalescent, sitting up in bed in a garish cap festooned with cherry-coloured ribbons, and a silk wadded jacket to match. I questioned her about her daughter-in-law, in whom for the first time I felt interested. It needed no acumen on my part to draw forth the whole of Blanche's short history. One slight question was all that was necessary to turn on the cock of Mrs. Robinson's confidences. The stream gushed forth at once, it overflowed, it could hardly be turned off again. I was drenched. "How long has Blanche been married? Two years, Dr. Giles. She's just nineteen. That's her age--nineteen. Seventeen and three days when she married. Such a romance. _She_ was seventeen and Arthur was twenty-two. Five years difference. Just right, and you never saw two young people so much in love with each other. And such a beautiful couple. It was a love match. Made in heaven. Just like his father and me over again. That is what I said to them. I said on their wedding day: 'Well, I hope you will be as happy as your father and I were.'" There was not much information to be retrieved from Mrs. Robinson's gushings, but in the course of the next few days I hooked up out of a flood of extraneous matter a few facts which had apparently escaped her notice. Blanche it seemed was the niece of a former Senior Curate of St. Botolph's. "A splendid preacher, Dr. Giles, and a real churchman, high mass and confession, and incense, just the priest for St. Botolph's, a dedicated celibate and vegetarian--such a saintly example to us all." It appeared obvious to me, though not to Mrs. Robinson, that the vegetarian celebate had been embarrassed as to what to do with his niece, when at the age of seventeen she had been suddenly left on his hands owing to the inconvenient death of her widowed mother. Evidently Blanche had not had a farthing.