"Well, you never listen to half I say. And how was I to know that Doctor
Callandar was the Harry Chedridge I used to know? He took the name of
Callandar from an uncle—or something. Anyway it isn't his own."
Esther hulled a particularly fine berry and carefully putting the hull in the pan, threw the berry away.
"Curiouser and curiouser!" she said, quoting the immortal Alice. "Did you recognise him at once?"
If it be possible for a lady of this enlightened age to simper, Mrs. Coombe simpered. "He recognised me at once!" with faint emphasis on the pronouns.
The girl choked down a rising inclination to laugh.
"Why shouldn't he? I suppose you haven't changed very much."
"Hardly at all, he says; at least he says he would have known me anywhere. But it's quite a long time, you know, terribly long. I was a young girl then. Naturally, he was much older."
"I should have thought so. That's why it seems queer—your having been schoolmates."
Mrs. Coombe looked cross. "I did not mean schoolmates in that sense."
"Oh, merely in a Pickwickian sense!" Esther's laugh bubbled out.