Then he urged the publication of the notes in some medical journal, showing true and generous anxiety that honour should be given where honour was due, and that his system should have the support of a name not yet forgotten.  Further, he told his visitors that they would hear from him soon, and altogether they came home so much gratified that the mother began to lose her sense of being forestalled.  She was hard at work in her own way on a set of models for dinner-table ornaments which had been ordered.  “Pot-boilers” had unfortunately much more success than the imaginary groups she enjoyed.

Therefore she stayed at home and only sent her young people on a commission to bring her as many varieties of foliage and seed-vessels as they could, when Jock and Armine spent this first holiday of waiting in setting forth with Babie to get a regular good country walk, grumbling horribly that she would not accompany them.

She was deep in the moulding of a branch of chestnut, which carried her back to the first time she saw those prickly clusters, on that day of opening Paradise at Richmond, with Joe by her side, then still Mr. Brownlow to her, Joe, who had seemed so much closer to her side in these last few days.  The Colonel might call Armine the most like Joe, and say that Jock almost absurdly recalled her own soldier-father, Captain Allen, but to her, Jock always the most brought back her husband’s words and ways, in a hundred little gestures and predilections, and she had still to struggle with her sense of injury that he should not be the foremost.

The maid came up with two cards:  Dr. and Mrs. Ruthven.  This was speedy, and Caroline had to take off her brown holland apron, and wash her hands, while Emma composed her cap, in haste and not very good will, for she could not but think them her natural enemies, though she was ready to beat herself for being so small and nasty “when they could not help it, poor things.”

However, Mrs. Ruthven turned out to be a pleasant lively table d’hote acquaintance of six or seven years ago in her maiden days, and her doctor an agreeable Scotsman, who told Mrs. Brownlow that he had been here on several evenings in former days, and did not seem at all hurt that she did not remember him.  He seemed disappointed that neither of the young men was at home, and inquired whether they had anything in view.  “Not definitely,” she said, and she spoke of some of the various counsels Dr. Medlicott and others had given them.

In the midst she heard that peculiar dash with which the Fordham carriage always announced itself.  Little Esther might be ever so much a Viscountess, but could she ever cease to be shy?  In spite of her increasing beauty and grace, she was not a success in society, for the ladies said she was slow; she had no conversation, and no dash or rattle to make up for it, and nothing would ever teach her to like strangers.  They were only so many disturbances