"I am always at home!" returned Miss Girnigo, keeping up a semblance of severity, but secretly mollified by the homage of Gibby's smile.
"Then I hope you will let me come here very often. I shall find it lonely in the village, but I thought it better to be near my work," said Gilbert; "I am staying with Mrs. Tennant, the doctor's widow. Do you know Mrs. Tennant?"
"Oh, yes," said Miss Girnigo, smiling for the first time; "she is one of my dearest friends. I often go there to tea."
"I love tea," said Gilbert, with enthusiasm; "Mrs. Tennant has invited me to take tea in her parlour in the afternoon as often as I like, but I was not expecting such a reward as this!"
Miss Girnigo was considerably over forty, but she was even more than youthfully amenable to flattery and to the Eel's beaming and boyish face.
"You are the new assistant," she said, "Mister ah !"
"Denholm!" said Gilbert, smiling; "it is a nice name. Don't you think so?"
"I have not thought anything about the matter," said Miss Girnigo, bridling, yet with the ghost of a blush. "I do not charge my mind with such things. Have you come to see my father?"
"Yes, after a while. But just at present I would rather see your plants!" said the Serpent, who had been well coached. (No wonder Watty Learmont smiled when he asserted that the New Man would preach on Sunday.)
Now Miss Girnigo lived chiefly for her flowers. The Serpent had a list of them, roughly but accurately compiled from the lady's seed-merchant's ledger by a friend in the business. He had also a fund of information respecting "plants," very recently acquired, on his mind.
"How did you know I was fond of flowers?" asked Miss Girnigo.
"Could any one doubt it?" cried Gilbert, with enthusiasm. "Who was the Jo " (he was on the brink of saying "Johnny") "g gentleman of whom it was said: 'If you want to see his monument, look around' Sir Christopher Wren, wasn't it? Well, I looked around as I came up the street!"
And Gilbert took in the whole front of the manse with his glance. It certainly was very pretty, covered from top to bottom with rambler roses and Virginia cress.
Gilbert entered, and as they passed in front of the minister's study door Miss Girnigo almost skittishly made a sign for silence, and Gilbert tip-toed past with an exaggeration of caution which made his companion laugh. They found themselves presently in the drawing-room, where again the flower-pots were everywhere, but specially banked round the oriel window. Gilbert named them one after the other like children at a baptism, with a sort of easy certainty and familiarity. His friend the nurseryman's clerk had not failed him. Miss Girnigo was delighted.
"Well," she said, "it is pleasant to have some one who knows Ceterach Officinarum from a kail-stock. We shall go botanising together!"
"Ye-es," said Gilbert, a little uncertainly, and with less enthusiasm than might have been expected.
"Good heavens," he was saying, "how shall I grind up the beastly thing if I have to live up to all this?"
But Miss Girnigo was in high good-humour, though her pleasure was sadly marred by the incipient cold in her head, which she was conscious prevented her from doing herself justice. At forty, eyes that water and a nose tipped with pink do not make for maiden beauty.
"I have a dreadful cold coming on, Mr. Denholm," she said; "I really am not fit to be seen. I wonder what I was thinking of to ask you in!"
"Try this," said Gilbert, pulling a kind of india-rubber puff-ball out of his pocket; "it is quite good. It makes you sneeze like the very ahem like anything. Stops a cold in no time won't be happy till you get it!"
"I don't dare to how does it work?" demurred Miss Girnigo.
Gilbert illustrated, and began to sneeze promptly, as the snuff titillated his air passages.
"Now you try!" he said, and smiled.
Gilbert held it insinuatingly to the lady's nostrils and pumped vigorously.
"A-tish shoo! " remarked the lady, as if he had touched a spring.
"A-tish shoo-oo-ooh! " replied Gilbert.
After that they responded antiphonally, like Alp answering Alp, till the door opened and Dr. Girnigo appeared with a half-written sheet of sermon paper in his hand.
The guilty pair stood rooted to the ground at least, spasmodically so, for
every other moment a sneeze lifted one of them upon tiptoe.
"What is this, Arabella, what is this? What is this young man doing here?"
"Don't be a-tish oo stupid, papa! You know very well shoo it is Mr. Denholm, the new Assist aroo !"
"Sir!" said Dr. Girnigo, turning upon his junior and angrily stamping his foot.
Gilbert held out his hand, and as the Doctor did not take it he waggled it feebly in the air with a sort of impotent good-fellowship.
"All right," he said; "better presently only c-curing Miss Miss Girni goo-ahoo arish-chee-hoo of a cold!"
"I do not know any one of that name, sir!" thundered the Doctor, not wholly unreasonably.
"No?" said Gilbert, anxiously; "I understood that this a-tishoo lady was Miss Girnigo, though I thought she was too young for a daughter your granddaughter, perhaps, Doctor?"