“I thought you might be going down to Honedale as I knew you returned last night, so I brought these flowers for your patient, with my compliments; or if you prefer I will give them to you, and you can present them as if coming from yourself.”
“As if I would do that,” the doctor answered, taking the bouquet in his hand the better to examine and admire it. “Did you arrange it, or your gardener?” he asked, and when Guy replied that the merit of arrangement, if merit there were, belonged to himself, he began to deprecate his own awkwardness and want of tact. “Here I have been cudgeling my head this half hour trying to think what I could take her as a peace-offering, and could think of nothing, while you—well, you and I are different entirely. You know just what is proper—just what to say, and when to say it—while I am a perfect bore, and without doubt shall make some ludicrous blunder in delivering the flowers. To-day will be the first time really that we meet, as she was sleeping when I was there last, while on all other occasions she has paid no attention whatever to me.”
For a moment Guy regarded his friend attentively, noticing that extra care had been taken with his toilet, that the collar was fresh from the laundry, and the new cravat tied in a most unexceptionable manner, instead of being twisted in a hard knot, with the ends looking as if they had been chewed.
“Doc,” he said, when his survey was completed, “how old are you—twenty-six or twenty-seven?”
“Just your age;—why?” and the doctor looked up with an expression so wholly innocent of Guy’s real meaning, that the latter, instead of telling why, replied:
“Oh! nothing; only I was wondering if you would do to be my father. Agnes, I verily believe is more than half in love with you; but, on the whole, I should not like to be your son; so I guess you’d better take some one younger—say Jessie. You are only eighteen years her senior.”
The doctor stared at him amazed, and when he had finished, said, with the utmost candor: “What has that to do with Madeline? I thought we were talking of her.”
“Innocent as the new-born babe,” was Guy’s mental comment, as he congratulated himself on his larger and more varied experience.
And truly Dr. Holbrook was as simple-hearted as a child, and never dreamed of Guy’s meaning, or that any emotion save a perfectly proper one had a lodgment in his breast as he drove down to Honedale, guarding carefully Guy’s bouquet, and wishing he knew just what he ought to say when he presented it.