it now by ill-judged questions, it might be kept dark still; and she therefore pursued her inquiries no further. She loyally called him “Doctor,” to the end, however. Failure that he had been, puzzle that he was, mine of danger that he might eventually prove to be, the former bulwark of her father’s fortunes should lack nothing she could give him, least of all a title of respect.
Old Mr. Miller was very happy at the farm. His original scruples once routed by Mrs. Callender’s abduction of his person, he never recurred to them—indeed he probably forgot all about them—and accepted her ministrations as naturally, and with as little question as a child. The seclusion of the place suited him well; and in the old kitchen he could enjoy his stipulated solitude without stint. As in its earliest days of all, the old room was now again both bed-chamber and living-room. Once more it enclosed and guarded all the material activities of an entire human life, and provided, with what seemed a peculiar fitness, for the helplessness of him by whose help it had been conserved to the use of its original inmates. The old man became very fond of it; he quitted it, indeed, only for the garden; for he was very shy. The farm itself he never went outside from the day he came to it, and he could never be induced to face any of Mrs. Callender’s once more infrequent visitors. People, he once explained to her, were like noises, and “broke his thoughts.”
Of another kind of society, however, presumably less destructive, he was extremely fond—the society, namely, of all the lesser creation, feathered or four-legged, provided only that it was not too big and
