“Distemperature!” said her father; “Oh, thou art a sweet lipped physician, and wouldst, I warrant me, drop nought but sweet balm, and honey, and oil, on my distemperature—if that is the phrase for an old man’s ailment, when he is wellnigh heart-broken.—Once more, what of thy uncle Everard?” His last words were uttered in a high and peevish tone of voice; and Alice Lee answered her father in a trembling and submissive tone. “I only meant to say, sir, that I am well assured that my uncle Everard, when we quit this place”— “That is to say, when we are kicked out of it by crop-eared canting villains like himself.—But on with thy bountiful uncle—what will he do?—will he give us the remains of his worshipful and economical housekeeping, the fragments of a thrice-sacked capon twice a-week, and a plentiful fast on the other five days?—Will he give us beds beside his half-starved nags, and put them under a short allowance of straw, that his sister’s husband—that I should have called my deceased angel by such a name!—and his sister’s daughter, may not sleep on the stones? Or will he send us a noble each, with a warning to make it last, for he had never known the ready-penny so hard to come by? Or what else will your uncle Everard do for us? Get us a furlough to beg? Why, I can do that without him.” “You misconstrue him much,” answered Alice, with more spirit than she had hitherto displayed; “and would you but question your own heart, you would acknowledge—I speak with reverence—that your tongue utters what your better judgment would disown. My uncle Everard is neither a miser nor a hypocrite—neither so fond of the goods of this world that he would not supply our distresses amply, nor so wedded to fanatical opinions as to exclude charity for other sects beside his own.” “Ay, ay, the Church of England is a _sect_ with him, I doubt not, and perhaps with thee too, Alice,” said the knight. “What is a Muggletonian, or a Ranter, or a Brownist, but a sectary? and thy phrase places them all, with Jack Presbyter himself, on the same footing with our learned prelates and religious clergy! Such is the cant of the day thou livest in, and why shouldst thou not talk like one of the wise virgins and psalm-singing sisters, since, though thou hast a profane old cavalier for a father, thou art own niece to pious uncle Everard?” “If you speak thus, my dear father,” said Alice, “what can I answer you? Hear me but one patient word, and I shall have discharged my uncle Everard’s commission.” “Oh, it is a commission, then? Surely, I suspected so much from the beginning—nay, have some sharp guess touching the ambassador also.— Come, madam, the mediator, do your errand, and you shall have no reason to complain of my patience.”