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Page 3
"You can't," said Tiny, with feminine contempt. "You can't plait.
What's the good of asking boys to do anything? There! it's done at
last. Now go and ask Mother if we may go.--Will you let me come,
Doctor," she inquired, "if I do as you said?"
"To be sure I will," he answered. "Let me look at you. Your eyes are
swollen with crying. How can you be such a silly little goose?"
"Did you never cry?" asked Tiny.
"When I was your age? Well, perhaps so."
"You've never cried since, surely," said Tiny.
The Doctor absolutely blushed.
"What do you think?" said he.
"Oh, of course not," she answered. "You've nothing to cry about. You're
grown up, and you live all alone in a beautiful house, and you do as
you like, and never get into rows, or have anybody but yourself to
think about; and no nasty pocket-handkerchiefs to hem."
"Very nice; eh, Deordie?" said the Doctor.
"Awfully jolly," said Deordie.
"Nothing else to wish for, eh?"
"_I_ should keep harriers, and not a poodle, if I were a man," said
Deordie; "but I suppose you could, if you wanted to."
"Nothing to cry about, at any rate?"
"I should think not!" said Deordie.--"There's Mother, though; let's go
and ask her about the tea;" and off they ran.
The Doctor stretched his six feet of length upon the sward, dropped his
grey head on a little heap of newly-mown grass, and looked up into the
sky.
"Awfully jolly--no nasty pocket-handkerchiefs to hem," said he,
laughing to himself. "Nothing else to wish for; nothing to cry about."
Nevertheless, he lay still, staring at the sky, till the smile died
away, and tears came into his eyes. Fortunately, no one was there to
see.
What could this "awfully jolly" Doctor be thinking of to make him cry?
He was thinking of a grave-stone in the churchyard close by, and of a
story connected with this grave-stone which was known to everybody in
the place who was old enough to remember it. This story has nothing to
do with the present story, so it ought not to be told.
And yet it has to do with the Doctor, and is very
short, so it shall be put in, after all.
THE STORY OF A GRAVE-STONE.
One early spring morning, about twenty years before, a man going to his
work at sunrise through the churchyard, stopped by a flat stone which
he had lately helped to lay down. The day before, a name had been cut
on it, which he stayed to read; and below the name some one had
scrawled a few words in pencil, which he read also--_Pitifully behold
the sorrows of our hearts_. On the stone lay a pencil, and a few feet
from it lay the Doctor, face downwards, as he had lain all night, with
the hoar frost on his black hair.
Ah! these grave-stones (they were ugly things in those days; not the
light, hopeful, pretty crosses we set up now), how they seem
remorselessly to imprison and keep our dear dead friends away from us!
And yet they do not lie with a feather's weight upon the souls that are
gone, while GOD only knows how heavily they press upon the souls that
are left behind. Did the spirit whose body was with the dead, stand
that morning by the body whose spirit was with the dead, and pity him?
Let us only talk about what we know.
After this it was said that the Doctor had got a fever, and was dying,
but he got better of it; and then that he was out of his mind, but he
got better of that, and came out looking much as usual, except that his
hair never seemed quite so black again, as if a little of that night's
hoar frost still remained. And no further misfortune happened to him
that I ever heard of; and as time went on he grew a beard, and got
stout, and kept a German poodle, and gave tea-parties to other people's
children. As to the grave-stone story, whatever it was to him at the
end of twenty years, it was a great convenience to his friends; for
when he said anything they didn't agree with, or did anything they
couldn't understand, or didn't say or do what was expected of him, what
could be easier or more conclusive than to shake one's head and say,
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