Then Mary looked up. "Very tired to-night, Humpty?"
Oh, if the patients who thought such worlds of their grim, overbearing Scotch doctor, and the nurses who trembled before him at the county infirmary, could have heard him called "Humpty"!—but to do so they must also have beheld the softening brow, the relaxing of the stern lips, the gradual light which crept into the piercing eyes—and only one person was ever suffered to behold these. Her tender accents unveiled what was hidden from the world.
"Tired, darling?"
"Well, may-be." Humpty made an effort and roused himself. "Perhaps I am, a bit. Those idiots at the infirmary let me in for a lot more trouble than I need have had,—but I daresay it will work out all right. I'm worried about a new case, too,—however, no shop. Let's gossip.—What have you been about?"
To meet this invariable question was part of her daily business, and however trifling the happenings of morning and afternoon might be, they were taxed to yield something whereby Humpty might be beguiled from his own thoughts.
To-night, however, was an unlucky night, she had only such very small beer to chronicle that he soon fell back upon them, and they comprised the return of General Boldero's widowed daughter, and her probable future under his roof.
"She won't have a gay time of it—at least she would not, if she had come empty-handed,—perhaps as things are, it may be different."
"You forget, Humpty, that he always made a fuss about Leonore."
"I don't forget;" the doctor shook his head; "but I remember other things as well. It's all very well to try to whitewash that old sinner, but you don't know human nature as I do, my bairn. For that matter, I am not the only one to say nasty things of old Brown-boots. It is common talk that for all his posing as the genial squire and jolly paterfamilias, Brown-boots is as mean a skunk as breathes."
"I know he is rather a martinet at home, but——"