open the door and send her into the house, and then hurry round to the
stable to prevent the boys lingering while Jerry was rubbed down. He
had leisure and the heart, it seemed, for all such offices of kindness,
and his voice was the signal of instant obedience.

Later in the evening they were all out in the garden--Mrs. Carnegie too.
One by one the children were dismissed to bed, and when only Bessie was
left, the doctor filled his pipe and had a smoke, walking to and fro
under the hedge, over which he conversed at intervals with passing
neighbors. His wife and Bessie sat in the porch. The only thing in all
this that Mr. Fairfax could except to was the doctor's clay pipe. He
denounced smoking as a low, pernicious habit; the lawyer, more tolerant,
remarked that it was an increasing habit and good for the revenue, but
bad for him: he believed that many a quarrel that might have ripened
into a lawsuit had prematurely collapsed in the philosophy that comes of
tobacco-smoke.

"Perhaps it would prepare me with equanimity to meet my adversary," said
Mr. Fairfax.

Mr. John Short had not intended to give the conversation this turn. He
feared that his client was working himself into an unreasonable humor,
in which he would be ready to transfer to Mr. Carnegie the reproaches
that were due only to himself. He was of a suspicious temper, and had
already insinuated that the people who had kept his grandchild must have
done it from interested and ulterior motives. The lawyer could not see
this, but he did see that if Mr. Fairfax was bent on making a contest of
what might be amicably arranged, no power on earth could hinder him. For
though it proverbially takes two to make a quarrel, the doctor did not
look as if he would disappoint a man of sharp contention if he sought