“Oh, bother! She doesn’t think of me. I want some silks, too, please. I shall have to make Stacey a pair of slippers and a lot of other pretty things. And oh, Tessa, I haven’t told you the news! The queerest thing! Dr. Towne—we must call him that now—has bought that handsome brick house opposite the Park and is going into practice. Dr. Lake says that of course people will run after him while they would let him starve!”
“Then he’ll smell of medicine, too,” Tessa could not forbear suggesting.
“Yes, and have bottles in all his pockets. I’m going to see your mother; she cares more about dress than you and Dine put together. If your father should die, she would be married before either of you. I won’t come if you look so cross at me.”
At that moment Mr. Hammerton pushed open the door; he had come for gloves and handkerchiefs. Tessa selected them for him and would then have waited for her word with Miss Jewett, had not one of the clerks returned from supper.
“Come, Lady Blue, I am going your way.”
“Father is not well to-night; he will not play chess.”
“I am going all the same, however; you shall play with me, and Dine shall read the ‘Nut Brown Maid.’”
As they were crossing the Park, they met Dr. Lake; he was walking hurriedly; she could not see his face.
“What do you think Lake said to me last night? We were talking—rather, he was—about trouble. He has seen a good deal of it one time and another I imagine; his nerves are so raw that every thing hurts. For want of something to suit him in my own experience, I quoted a thought of Charles Kingsley’s. He turned upon me as if I had struck him—‘A man in a book said that.’ A man in a book did say it, so I had nothing to say. Something is troubling you, what is it?”
“More than one something is troubling me. I just heard a bit of news.”