"Well, I never! They must have been put about; as you would have been yourself, Mrs. Hankey, if you'd found so little after expecting so much."
"In course I should; it wasn't in flesh and blood not to be, and station-master and crowner are but mortal, like the rest of us. I assure you, when I first heard the story, I pitied them from the bottom of my heart."
"And what became of Peter in the midst of it all, Mrs. Hankey?"
"Oh! it woke him up with a vengeance; and, of course, it flustered him a good deal, when he rightly saw how matters stood, to have to make his excuses to all them grand gentlemen for not being a murdered corpse. But as I says to him afterward, he'd no one but himself to blame; first for being so troublesome as to have the toothache, and then for being so presumptuous as to try and cure it. And his father is just the same; if you take your eye off him for a minute he is bound to be in some mischief or another."
"There's no denying that husbands is troublesome, Mrs. Hankey, and sons is worse; but all the same I stand up for 'em both, and I wish Miss Elisabeth had got one of the one and half a dozen of the other. Mark my words, she'll never do better, taking him all round, than Master Christopher."
Mrs. Hankey sighed. "I only hope she'll find it out before it is too late, and he is either laid in an early grave or else married to a handsomer woman, as the case may be, and both ways out of her reach. But I doubt it. She was a dark baby, if you remember, was Miss Elisabeth; and I never trust them as has been dark babies, and never shall."
"And how is Peter's toothache now?" inquired Mrs. Bateson, who was a more tender-hearted matron than Peter's mother.
"Oh! it's no better; and I know no one more aggravating than folks who keep sayin' they are no better when you ask 'em how they are. It always seems so ungrateful. Only this morning I asked our Peter how his tooth was, and he says, 'No better, mother; it was so bad in the night that I fairly wished I was dead.' 'Don't go wishing that,' says I; 'for if you was dead you'd have far worse pain, and it 'ud last for ever and ever.' I really spoke quite sharp to him, I was that sick of his grumbling; but it didn't seem to do him no good."
"Speaking sharp seldom does do much good," Mrs. Bateson remarked sapiently, "except to them as speaks."