character! During all the talk that had followed his proposal, and when he had hurriedly recited for them a number of Teddy's speeches, his accent had nowise differed from their own. The fact, noted in some obscure corner of the doctor's brain, now in the silence of the vacant room, obtruded itself with an unwelcome insistence. It was a slight thing, yet of a curious significance; a person could not thus at will abandon the habit of a lifetime. Say it were not such a habit, what then? Why, then the dialect was put on, like a garment; and for what reason? If that was the case, Huddesley was by far too much of a "hactor" to be officiating in the doctor's kitchen. We do not look for, nor somehow relish so much versatility in one of Huddesley's degree. Doctor Vardaman's thoughts hardly proceeded in so orderly a sequence as they have been here set down, but by vague speculative turns and windings they reached the last conclusion. He began uncomfortably to review the manner of his engaging Huddesley, and was startled to realise how little he actually knew of the man, how haphazard had been his methods of hiring servants. "I'll write to that Lord Whatever-his-name-was to-morrow," he told himself--and then had to smile a little at this access of belated caution. The whole thing, of course, was capable of some very simple explanation, he thought impatiently, unwilling to own himself baffled; there was not necessarily a dark, bloody mystery about a person's speaking in dialect one moment and in the queen's English the next. It might be that Huddesley was the exiled black sheep of some decent, even gentle family--well, perhaps, not a black sheep, but at least a brindled one, not good enough for the station to which he had been born, too good for that to which he had sunk; stranger things than that have happened. He had told a perfectly straight story; even if it were an invention, that, so long as the man behaved himself, was no concern of Doctor Vardaman's. "And when he misbehaves," said the doctor inwardly, "why, then, like Dogberry, I'll let him go, and thank God I am rid of a knave! I don't believe he _is_ a knave, but certainly I've always had an idea he was no ordinary man. Maybe I'd better have a talk with him to-morrow."