"Huddesley's simply _fine_!" she said with enthusiasm. "I asked him how he came to know so much about the stage, and he says he was dresser for an actor once when he was right young, and used to be behind the scenes a lot. Come home and take lunch with us, won't you, Doctor?" "I can't very well to-day. I was just about to ask you to stay here. Huddesley, you can get us up something, can't you?" "Bit of 'am and a glass of porter, sir," said Huddesley deferentially, holding the door open. "Beg parding, Doctor Vardaman, sir, but Mrs. Maginnis is 'ere with your wash." "I guess we'd better not stop so long's I've got so much company in the house," said Mazie. "Good-bye, Doctor; you'll come up this evening, anyway?" And as they walked away, the doctor heard Bob say, "Isn't Huddesley _immense_, though? 'Bit of 'am and a glass of porter.' Sounds just like Dickens, don't it?" The doctor, still squired by unseen Fortune, went upstairs to his bedroom--and there, it may be presumed, the goddess left him, having executed her appointed task. Mrs. Maginnis awaited him, and Huddesley was already laying the doctor's shirts out of the basket. The laundress generally performed this rite herself, but to-day she stood watching the man with an oddly flustered manner, twisting the fringes of her old shawl between her fingers. Her bonnet, that feathered and beribboned structure indigenous to washerwomen, had worked askew a little; her face, with its premature wrinkles, its sunken mouth, was flushed with exercise or excitement. The doctor, observant as all physicians from lifelong habit, looked at her in some surprise. It crossed his mind that at some prehistorically distant time, when Mrs. Maginnis was a fresh barefoot girl, running the green swards of Connemara, she might have been pretty; her Irish blue eyes, faded with years, with toil, with sickness, with care, were quite bright to-day. A kind of tremulous happiness, an anxious joy, irradiated her; she was like a child to whom one should have given a new toy, scarcely daring to be glad yet in its possession. "Got change for a fifty-dollar bill, Mrs. Maginnis?" said the old gentleman jocosely. "Yez will have yer joke, now, won't ye, Docthor?" she retorted with gaiety, and tossed her head with the upstanding plumes in a roguish manner. "Niver moind. Some day I'll change ut for yez aisy enough. 'Taint much longer I'll be comin' 'round for me dollar and a half, at all, at all." "Has Tim got well? Is he going back to work?" asked the doctor, beginning to fish for the required sum amongst the loose silver in his pockets. He spoke of her husband. Tim was what Doctor Vardaman called a "non-combatant." To say that he was a washerwoman's husband describes him. Who ever heard of a washerwoman with a husband that was worth anything?