athlete, but powerful and vigorous almost
beyond anything then known in Carlingford. It was now summer, and warm
weather, and the dress of the new-comer was as unusual as the other
particulars of his appearance. In his broad straw-hat and linen coat he
stood cool and large in the shady hall of the Blue Boar, with glimpses
of white English linen appearing under his forest of beard, and round
his brown sun-scorched wrists. A very small stretch of imagination was
necessary to thrust pistols into his belt and a cutlass into his hand,
and reveal him as the settler-adventurer of a half-savage disturbed
country, equally ready to work or to fight, and more at home in the
shifts and expedients of the wilderness than among the bonds of
civilisation; yet always retaining, as English adventurers will, certain
dainty personal particulars--such, for instance, as that prejudice in
favour of clean linen, which only the highest civilisation can cultivate
into perfection. He went off down Grange Lane with the swing and poise
of a Hercules when the admiring waiters directed him to the Cottage.
Miss Wodehouse, who was standing at the door with Lucy, in the long grey
cloak and close bonnet lately adopted by the sisterhood of mercy, which
had timidly, under the auspices of the perpetual curate, set itself
a-going at St Roque's, looked after the savage man with an instinct of
gentle curiosity, wondering where he was going and where he came from.
To tell the truth, that tender-hearted soul could with more comfort
to herself have stepped down a little on the road to St Roque's, and
watched whether that extraordinary figure was in search of Nettie--a
suspicion which immediately occurred to her--than she could set out
upon the district-visiting, to which Lucy now led her forth. But Miss
Wodehouse had tremulously taken example by the late rector, whose abrupt
retirement from the duties for which he did not feel himself qualified,
the good people in Carlingford had scarcely stopped discussing. Miss
Wodehouse, deeply impressed in her gentle mind by the incidents of that
time, had considered it her duty to reclaim if possible--she who had no
circle of college dons to retire into--her own life from its habits of
quiet indolence. She consented to go with Lucy into all the charitable
affairs of Carlingford. She stood silent with a pitying face, and
believed in all the pretences of beggary which Lucy saw through by
natural insight. But it was no more her