"I will stay till I have paid you my debt somehow!" he said--"I'm old--but I can do a few useful things yet." "I'm sure you can!" And she nodded cheerfully--"And you shall! Now rest a while, and don't fret!" She went away from him then to fetch the little dog, Charlie, who, now that his master was on the fair road to complete recovery, was always brought in to amuse him after tea. Charlie was full of exuberant life, and his gambols over the bed where Helmsley lay, his comic interest in the feathery end of his own tail, and his general intense delight in the fact of his own existence, made him a merry and affectionate little playmate. He had taken immensely to his new home, and had attached himself to Mary Deane with singular devotion, trotting after her everywhere as close to her heels as possible. The fame of his beauty had gone through the village, and many a small boy and girl came timidly to the cottage door to try and "have a peep" at the smallest dog ever seen in the neighbourhood, and certainly the prettiest. "That little dawg be wurth twenty pun!"--said one of the rustics to Mary, on one occasion when she was sitting in her little garden, carefully brushing and combing the silky coat of the little "toy"--"Th'owd man thee's been a' nussin' ought to give 'im to thee as a thank-offerin'." "I wouldn't take him,"--Mary answered--"He's perhaps the only friend the poor old fellow has got in the world. It would be just selfish of me to want him." And so the time went on till it was past mid-September, and there came a day, mild, warm, and full of the soft subdued light of deepening autumn, when Mary told her patient that he might get up, and sit in an armchair for a few hours in the kitchen. She gave him this news when she brought him his breakfast, and added-- "I'll wrap you up in father's dressing gown, and you'll be quite cosy and safe from chill. And after another week you'll be so strong that you'll be able to dress yourself and do without me altogether!"