"Mr. Gibson, if you wish it, I'll swear it on the Bible," cried the
excitable young man.
"Nonsense. As if your word, if it's worth anything, wasn't enough!
We'll shake hands upon it, if you like."
Mr. Coxe came forward eagerly, and almost squeezed Mr. Gibson's ring
into his finger.
As he was leaving the room, he said, a little uneasily, "May I give
Bethia a crown-piece?"
"No, indeed! Leave Bethia to me. I hope you won't say another word to
her while she's here. I shall see that she gets a respectable place
when she goes away."
Then Mr. Gibson rang for his horse, and went out on the last visits
of the day. He used to reckon that he rode the world around in the
course of the year. There were not many surgeons in the county who
had so wide a range of practice as he; he went to lonely cottages on
the borders of great commons; to farm-houses at the end of narrow
country lanes that led to nowhere else, and were overshadowed by the
elms and beeches overhead. He attended all the gentry within a circle
of fifteen miles round Hollingford; and was the appointed doctor to
the still greater families who went up to London every February--as
the fashion then was--and returned to their acres in the early weeks
of July. He was, of necessity, a great deal from home, and on this
soft and pleasant summer evening he felt the absence as a great evil.
He was startled at discovering that his little one was growing fast
into a woman, and already the passive object of some of the strong
interests that affect a woman's life; and he--her mother as well as
her father--so much away that he could not guard her as he would
have wished. The end of his cogitations was that ride to Hamley the
next morning, when he proposed to allow his daughter to accept Mrs.
Hamley's last invitation--an invitation that had been declined at the
time.
"You may quote against me the proverb, 'He that will not when he
may, when he will he shall have nay.' And I shall have no reason to
complain," he had said.
But Mrs. Hamley was only too much charmed with the prospect of having
a young girl for a visitor; one whom it would not be a trouble to
entertain; who might be sent out to ramble in the gardens, or told
to read when the invalid was too much fatigued for conversation; and
yet one whose youth and freshness would bring a charm, like a waft
of sweet summer air, into her lonely shut-up life. Nothing could be
pleasanter, and so Molly's visit to Hamley was easily settled.