'Hush! is that Fairy? Oh, no, it is only Anne singing. Little man has not been well yesterday and to-day. He won't eat, and looks pale, but he slept very well, my darling man; and Doctor Buddle--I met him this morning--so kindly took him into his room, and examined him, and says it may be nothing at all, please Heaven,' and she sighed, smiling still. 'Dear little Fairy--where is he?' asked Rachel, her sad eyes looking toward the door. 'In the study with his Wapsie. Mrs. Woolaston, she is such a kind soul, lent him such a beautiful old picture book--"Woodward's Eccentricities" it is called--and he's quite happy--little Fairy, on his little stool at the window.' 'No headache or fever?' asked Miss Lake cheerfully, though, she knew not why, there seemed something ominous in this little ailment. 'None at all; oh, none, thank you; none in the world. I'd be so frightened if there was. But, thank Heaven, Doctor Buddle says there's nothing to make us at all uneasy. My blessed little man! And he has his canary in the cage in the window, and his kitten to play with in the study. He's quite happy.' 'Please Heaven, he'll be quite well to-morrow--the darling little man,' said Rachel, all the more fondly for that vague omen that seemed to say, 'He's gone.' 'Here's Mr. Larkin!' cried Dolly, jumping up, and smiling and nodding at the window to that long and natty apparition, who glided to the hall-door with a sad smile, raising his well-brushed hat as he passed, and with one grim glance beyond Mrs. Wylder, for his sharp eye half detected another presence in the room. He was followed, not accompanied--for Mr. Larkin knew what a gentleman he was--by a young and bilious clerk, with black hair and a melancholy countenance, and by old Buggs--his conducting man--always grinning, whose red face glared in the little garden like a great bunch of hollyhocks. He was sober as a judge all the morning, and proceeded strictly on the principle of business first, and pleasure afterward. But his orgies, when off duty, were such as to cause the good attorney, when complaints reached him, to shake his head, and sigh profoundly, and sometimes to lift up his mild eyes and long hands; and, indeed, so scandalous an appendage was Buggs, that if he had been less useful, I believe the pure attorney, who, in the uncomfortable words of John Bunyan, 'had found a cleaner road to hell,' would have cashiered him long ago. 'There is that awful Mr. Buggs,' said Dolly, with a look of honest alarm. 'I often wonder so Christian a man as Mr. Larkin can countenance him. He is hardly ever without a black eye. He has been three nights together without once putting off his clothes--think of that; and, my dear, on Friday week he fell through the window of the Fancy Emporium, at two o'clock in the morning; and Doctor Buddle says if the cut on his jaw had been half an inch lower, he would have cut some artery, and lost his life--wretched man!'