hree capacities, he was enslaved by that little
innocent, sad face. He made the Doctor's head whirl again; he fairly
stopped Mrs. Joyce's progress with the fancy jacket, as he sang the
child's praises, and compared her face to every angel's face that had
ever been painted, from the days of Giotto to the present time. At last,
when he had fairly exhausted his hearers and himself, he dashed abruptly
out of the room, to cool down his excitement by a moonlight walk in the
rectory garden.

"What a very odd man he is!" said Mrs. Joyce, taking up a dropped stitch
in the fancy jacket.

"Valentine, my love, is the best creature in the world," rejoined the
doctor, folding up the Rubbleford Mercury, and directing it for the
post; "but, as I often used to tell his poor father (who never would
believe me), a little cracked. I've known him go on in this way about
children before--though I must own, not quite so wildly, perhaps, as he
talked just now."

"Do you think he'll do anything imprudent about the child? Poor thing!
I'm sure I pity her as heartily as anybody can."

"I don't presume to think," answered the doctor, calmly pressing the
blotting-paper over the address he had just written. "Valentine is one
of those people who defy all conjecture. No one can say what he will do,
or what he won't. A man who cannot resist an application for shelter and
supper from any stray cur who wags his tail at him in the street; a man
who blindly believes in the troubles of begging-letter impostors; a man
whom I myself caught, last time he was down here, playing at marbles
with three of my charity-boys in the street, and promising to treat them
to hardbake and gingerbeer afterwards, is--in short, is not a man whose
actions it is possible to speculate on."

Here the door opened, and Mr. Blyth's head was popped in, surmounted
by a ragged straw hat with a sky-blue ribbon round it. "Doctor,"
said Valentine, "may I ask an excellent woman, with whom I have made
acquaintance, to bring the child here to-morrow morning for you and Mrs.
Joyce to see?"

"Certainly," said the good-humored rector, laughing. "The child by all
means, and the excellent woman too."

"Not if it's Miss Florinda Beverley!" interposed Mrs. Joyce (who had
read the Circus placard). "Florinda, indeed! Jezebel would be a better
name for her!"

"My dear Madam, it isn't Florinda," cried Valentine, eagerly. "I quite
agree with you; her name ought to be Jezebel. And, what's worse,