Kitabı oku: «Dr. Lavendar's People», sayfa 11

"I have tried to make him comfortable," she said, faintly.

Suddenly she put the candle down and sank into a chair, covering her face with her poor, gaunt hands…

And so the night passed… The dawn was dim and rainy. It was about four o'clock that Alice, sitting on the floor, sleeping heavily, her head on the cushion of the chair, started, bewildered, at the noise of the opening door. Rebecca, in her gray dressing-gown, one hand shielding the flare of her candle, came abruptly into the room.

"Alice," she said, harshly, and stopped by the empty bed; then her eyes found the figure on the floor ("you ought to be in bed"), she said, in a brief aside; then: "Alice, I've been thinking it over. You can't take that money."

"I don't understand," Alice said, confused with sleep and tears.

"You can't take that money. If you do, your father would have to know. And he never must – he never must."

Alice pulled herself up from the floor and sat down in her big chair. "Not take the money?" she said, in a dazed way; "but it's mine."

"That's why you needn't take it. Thank God it was left to you, not just to 'her heirs.' Alice, I've gone all over it. I – I wanted you to take it" – Rebecca's voice broke; "yes, I – did."

"Well, it's mine," Alice repeated, bewildered.

Rebecca struck her hands together. "Yours not to take! Don't you see? You can save your father."

Alice, cringing, dropped her head on her breast with a broken word.

"Don't be a fool," the older woman said, trembling. "He's been your father ever since you were born. And it would be a pretty return for his love to tell him – "

Alice burst out crying; her step-mother softened.

"I am sorry for you, you poor girl. But, oh, Alice, think, think of your father!" She clasped her hands and stood, trembling; she took a step forward, almost as if she would kneel.

"If he would feel so dreadfully," Alice said, at last, "why – we needn't tell him where the money comes from."

"Now, Alice, that is absurd. Of course he would know. He would have to know. A girl doesn't inherit £5000 without her father's knowing where it comes from. And, anyway, Mr. Carter said that Mr. Gray would have to make a statement and swear to it. Of course he would – know."

"Do you mean you don't want me to have it at all?" Alice said, blankly.

"I've just explained it to you," Rebecca said, her voice harsh with anxiety. "You can't have it."

"But it's my money; I have a right to it. And it would make all the difference in the world to Lute. If he is going to take a girl – like me, he ought to have the money, anyhow."

"And kill your father?" Rebecca said. "Alice! Don't you see, he must go on believing that she is" – her voice grew suddenly tender – "that she is 'a creature of light?'"

"I want Lute to have the money," Alice said.

"Alice!" the other exclaimed, with dismay, "don't you think of your father at all? And – for your mother's sake."

Alice was silent; then, in a hard voice, "I don't like her."

"Oh!" Rebecca cried, and shivered. There was a pause; then she said, faintly, "For your own sake?"

Alice looked up sullenly. "Nobody need know; we would only say it had been left to – her. Nobody would know."

Suddenly, as she spoke, despite the plain face and the red hair, Alice looked like her mother. Rebecca stepped back with a sort of shock. Alice, crying a little, got up and began to pull down her hair and braid it, with unsteady fingers. Her step-mother watched her silently; then she turned to go away; then came back swiftly, the tears running down her face.

"Oh, Alice, it is my fault! I've had you twenty-two years, and yet you are like – See, Alice, child; give her a chance to be kind to him, in you. Oh, I – I don't know how to say it; I mean, let her have a chance! Oh – don't you see what I mean? She said she was sorry!" All the harshness had melted out of Rebecca's face; she was nothing but gentleness, the tears falling down her cheeks, her voice broken with love. "Alice, be good, dear. Be good. Be good. And I – I will be pleasanter, Alice; I'll try, indeed; I'll try – "

VI

"Well," said Mr. Amos Hughes, a week later, in the cool dusk of Dr. Lavendar's study, just before tea, "this is a most extraordinary situation, sir!"

"Will ye have a pipe?" said Dr. Lavendar, hospitably.

John Carter, his feet well apart, his back to the fireless grate, his hands thrust down into his pockets, said, looking over at his partner:

"Amos, Dr. Lavendar once remarked to me that there was no telling what human critters would do."

Dr. Lavendar chuckled.

"Very true," Amos Hughes admitted, putting one fat knee over the other; "but I must say that I never before knew a human critter throw away £5000."

"I'm sorry you haven't had better acquaintances," said Dr. Lavendar. "I have. I'm not in the least surprised at this child's behavior. Mr. Carter, are you looking for anything? You'll find a decanter on the sideboard in the next room, sir. This is a pretty good world, Mr. Amos Hughes; I've lived in it longer than you have, so you'll take my word for it. It's a pretty good old world, and Miss Alice Gray has simply decided to do the natural and proper thing. Why, what else could she do?"

"I could mention at least one other thing," said Mr. Carter.

"Extraordinary situation! but I suppose the residuary legatees won't make any objection," murmured Amos Hughes.

Dr. Lavendar rapped on the table with the bowl of his pipe. "My dear sir, would you have a girl, for a paltry £5000, break her father's heart?"

"Her father?"

"Mr. Gray would not, in my judgment, survive such a revelation," said Dr. Lavendar, stiffly.

"May I ask one question?" John Carter said.

"G'on," said Dr. Lavendar.

"What I would like to know is: How did you bring Miss Gray to look at the thing in this way?"

"I didn't bring her," said Dr. Lavendar, indignantly; "her Heavenly Father brought her. Look here, sir; this business of the law is all very well, and necessary, I suppose, in its way, but let me tell you, it's a dangerous business. You see so much of the sin of human nature that you get to thinking human nature has got to sin. You are mistaken, sir; it has got to be decent. We are the children of God, sir. I beg that you'll remember that – and then you won't be surprised when a child like our Alice does the right thing. Surprise is confession, Mr. Carter."

Mr. Carter laughed, and apologized as best he could for his view of human nature; and Dr. Lavendar was instantly amicable and forgiving. He took Mr. Amos Hughes's warning, that he should, as a matter of duty, lay very clearly before the young lady the seriousness of what she proposed to do, and not until he had exhausted every argument would he permit her to sign the papers of release which (as a matter of precaution) he had prepared. "She's of age," said Amos Hughes, "and nobody can say that she has not a right to refuse to proceed further in the matter. But I shall warn her."

"'Course, man," said Dr. Lavendar; "that's your trade."

And so the evening came, and the three men went up to Robert Gray's house.

It was a long evening. More than once Dr. Lavendar trembled as he saw the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them spread before his child's eyes. But he said no word, and once, sternly, he laid his hand on Rebecca's arm to check some word of hers.

"Let her alone," he said.

It was eleven o'clock before there came a moment of solemn silence. Alice bent over a paper, which John Carter had read aloud to her, and signed her name. Luther and Rebecca and Dr. Lavendar witnessed the signature. Then Rebecca Gray took the girl in her arms.

"That young man has got something to him," Mr. Amos Hughes said, as they went back to the Rectory.

"If you could put some printing in his way, it would be a favor to me," said Dr. Lavendar.

"I shouldn't wonder if I could," the lawyer said.

"The girl is a fine creature, poor child," said Mr. Carter.

"Gentlemen," said Dr. Lavendar, "they are both good children, and they have behaved well; but there's somebody else, let me tell you!"

However, he did not tell them. Perhaps he kept his opinion for Robert Gray's ears, for once he said, smiling, in Rebecca's presence:

"Robert, this wife of yours is a noble woman."

Mr. Gray, a little surprised, said, politely, looking with kind eyes at Rebecca, "Mrs. Gray is a very good wife, sir."

And Rebecca went up and hid herself in the garret and cried with joy.

AT THE STUFFED-ANIMAL HOUSE

I

Willy King's buggy, splashed to the top of the hood with mud and sagging sidewise on its worn old springs, came pulling up the hill past the burial-ground. The doctor himself, curled in one corner, rested a leg on the dash-board and hung his reins on the hook over his head. He was very sleepy, for he had been up until three with an old woman who thought she was sick, and he had been routed out of bed again at five because she told her family that she was going to die. William King was not given to sarcasm, but he longed to say to the waiting relatives, "There is no hope! – she'll live." Instead, he looked seriously sympathetic and kept his thoughts to himself. When he got home to breakfast, his wife told him how foolish he was to take so much trouble. "There's nothing the matter with Mrs. Drayton," said Mrs. King; "and I should tell her so, flatly and frankly. It would do her good."

William said that he would like another cup of coffee.

"It wouldn't be good for you," said his Martha; "you are drinking too much coffee. You can have shells if you want to. Shall I have some shells warmed up?"

William said "No," and went trudging off to his office; and then, at ten, started on his round of calls, his old buggy still unwashed from the morning jaunt to the hypochondriac's death-bed. The day was still and sunny, the road quite deserted and full of pleasant shadows under the May foliage. But the sleepy doctor saw it all through half-closed eyes, and yawned, and rested one plump leg on the dash-board, and let the reins hang swaying from the hook in the roof of the bug-pry. Then, suddenly, his mare stopped and William opened his eyes.

"Caught you napping, Willy!" said a loud, hearty voice. And the doctor sat up and drew his leg in and laughed.

"Well, Miss Harriet, how do you know but what I was worrying over a case?"

"Much worrying you do, young man!" She sat down on a log on the road-bank and smiled at him. She was a big, vigorous woman with a fresh, brown face and a keen, kind eye. She had a gun in her hand, and a rabbit's white tail stuck out of the hunting-wallet slung over her shoulder. She had broken through the underbrush on the hill-side just as Willy's buggy jogged into the shadow of a sycamore that stretched its mottled arms over the deserted road.

"Willy," she went on, in her loud, cheerful voice, "do you doctor-men smile at one another when you meet, like the Augurs, because you fool us so easily with your big words? You call a scratched finger an 'abrasion of the epidermis' – and then you send a bill. And, bless me! what a serious air you put on at a minute's notice! – I saw you pull your leg in, Willy. Come, now; you were in my Sunday-school class – why don't you just admit to me that that piercing look over your eye-glasses is one of the tricks of the trade? I won't tell."

William King chuckled. "You just get a touch of lumbago, Miss Harriet, and you'll believe in my tricks."

"Lumbago!" said his reviler. "Not I; a day's shooting would cure it quicker than a barrel of your pills."

"Been shooting this morning?"

"No; I set a trap in Dawson's hollow." She pulled out the rabbit and held it up. "Not a bone broken. Handsome, isn't he? Poor little thing!"

William looked at the soft, furry creature, limp in the big brown hand, with critical appreciation. "Yes, beautiful. Miss Annie didn't find him, to let him out?"

The hunter's face changed to amused impatience. "Willy, she opened three traps last week. And she was so shrewd about it; you would never believe how clever she is. Of course it's no use to scold."

"Of course not. What excuse does she make?"

"Oh, just the same thing: 'Sister, it hurts me to think they can't get out.'"

"Poor thing!" said the doctor.

"I have tried to make her promise not to interfere with the traps. You know, if I could once get a promise out of her I would be all right; Annie never broke a promise in her life. But she is too shrewd to be led into it. She always says, 'I'm the oldest, and you mustn't order me round.' It would be funny if it weren't so provoking."

"Poor thing!" said the doctor again.

"She follows me and takes the bait out of the traps once in a while; but she prefers to let things go. And she is certainly wonderfully bright about it," Miss Harriet said. "Now, why can't she be sensible in other things?"

"Well, you know she has always been about twelve; it's the young head on old shoulders."

"I must tell you her last performance," Miss Harriet said. "You know that picture of Aunt Gordon that hung in the dining-room? Dreadful thing! I never saw the poor woman, but I believe she wasn't quite as ugly as that portrait, though Alex looks just like her, Dr. Lavendar says; and Alex is dreadfully ugly, with those pale eyes of his. Well, I happened to say – it was last Tuesday, at tea, and Matty Barkley was there: 'That picture of Aunt Gordon is awful! I can't bear it.' Of course I never thought of it again, until I came home the next day – and what do you suppose?"

Willy began to grin.

"Yes! she had got up on a chair, if you please, and cut it out of the frame and slashed it all to pieces."

"Well done!" said Willy King, slapping his thigh.

"No such thing. It was ugly, but it was a family portrait."

"What did she say?"

"Oh, she had her excuse… Willy, I can't understand her mind; it is so unreasonably reasonable: 'Sister, you said you couldn't bear it, so what was the use of having it?' After all, that was sense, William."

"So it was," said the doctor, and unhooked his reins and nodded. "Well," he said —

But Miss Harriet laughed awkwardly. "Wait a minute, can't you? It won't kill anybody to do without a pill for five minutes."

"Well, no, I suppose it won't," William admitted; "but with a view to getting home in time for dinner – "

"Oh, let Martha wait. Willy, you are the meekest being – let her wait. Tell her you'll have your dinner when you're good and ready."

"Martha is only concerned on my own account," the loyal William protested.

"Well, I'm not going to keep you long," his old friend said, roughly; "I – I just want to ask you a question." Her face grew suddenly a dull red. "Not that I believe in your pills and potions – just please remember that. But I suppose you do know a little something."

"I could diagnose a scratched finger," said the doctor, meekly.

"Well – " she said, and looked at the lock of her rifle; "there's nothing in the world the matter with me, but – "

"You don't look like a confirmed invalid," the doctor assured her.

"No! – do I?" she said, eagerly. "I really am very well, William – very well. Dear me, when I get home after a round of my traps (when Annie hasn't teased me by letting things out) and eat a good dinner, and sit down with a taxidermy magazine, I – I wouldn't thank King George to be my uncle. Yes, I am very well."

Her emphasis had in it a certain agitation that caught the doctor's eye. "Your out-of-door life is calculated to keep you well," he said.

Miss Harriet got up and thrust the rabbit back into the pouch at her side. "Of course; and, anyhow, I'm not the sick kind. Imagine me shut up between four walls! I should be like Sterne's starling. Do you remember? – 'I want to get out, I want to get out.' No, there's nothing the matter with me. Absolutely nothing."

She did look very well, the big, brown woman, towering up at the road-side, with her rifle in her hand and the good color in her cheeks and lips. Yet her eyes had a worn look, William thought. "Pain somewhere," said the doctor to himself.

"You know, I don't believe in your pills and truck," she insisted, frowning.

"Of course not," he assured her easily. "Come, now, Miss Harriet, what's wrong?"

"Nothing, I tell you," she said, sharply; and then, with impatient brevity, she spoke of some special discomfort which had annoyed her. "It began about six months ago."

"Probably you've taken cold," William King said, and then he asked a question or two. She answered with irritable flippancy:

"Now don't put on airs, Willy. There's no use trying to impress me; I know you. Remember, you were in my Sunday-school class."

"Why didn't you make a better boy of me, then? You had your chance. Miss Harriet, would you mind coming into my office and just letting me look you over? Come, now, why shouldn't I get a job out of you for once? Here you tackle me on the road-side and get an opinion for nothing."

She chuckled, but retorted that she hated doctors and their offices. "I'm not that Drayton cat," she said, "always wanting a doctor to fuss over me. No, you can give me a pill right here – though I haven't a bit of faith in it."

"I wouldn't waste a good pill on you," the doctor defended himself. "You've got to come and see me."

But when she had promised to come, and William, slapping a rein down on the mare's flank, was jogging along under the sycamore branches, he did not fall into his pleasant drowse again. "She looks so well," he said to himself, "she must be all right – "

II

Miss Harriet's house, called by Old Chester children "The Stuffed-Animal House," was on the hill-road a stone's-throw beyond the burial-ground. It was of weather-worn brick, and its white lintels, carved in thin festoons of fruit and flowers, were nearly hidden by ivy that stretched dark figures over the marble, and, thickening with the years across the tops of the windows, made the rooms within dim with wavering leaf shadows. A brick path, damp and faintly green with moss, ran down to a green gate set in a ragged privet hedge that was always dusty and choked with dead twigs. The house itself was so shaded by horse-chestnuts that grass refused to grow in the door-yard. A porch shadowed the front door, which opened into a dark, square hall, full of dim figures that hung from the ceiling and stood in cases against the walls. A dusty crocodile stretched overhead, almost the width of the hall; a shark, with varnished belly splitting a little under one fin and showing a burst of cotton, lurked in a dim corner; over the parlor door a great snake, coiled about a branch, looked down with glittering, yellow eyes; and along the walls were cases of very beautiful birds, their plumage dulled now, for it was forty years since Miss Harriet's father had made his collection. But all around the hall were glistening eyes that stared and stared, until sometimes an Old Chester child, clinging to a mother's protecting hand, felt sure they moved, and that in another moment the crocodile's jaws would snap together, or the eagle's wings would flap horribly in the darkness.

Yet there was an awful joy to Old Chester youth in being allowed to accompany a mother when she made a polite call on Miss Harriet. This hall, that was dark and still and full of the smell of dead fur and feathers and some acrid preservative, had all the fascination of horror. If we were very good we were allowed to walk from case to case with old Miss Annie, while our mothers sat in the parlor and talked to Miss Harriet. Miss Annie could not tell us much of the creatures in the cases, and for all she used to laugh and giggle just as we did, she never really knew how to play that the hall was a desert island and the wild beasts were lurking in the forest to fall upon us.

"It isn't a forest, it's our front hall," Miss Annie would say; "and you must do what I tell you, because I'm the oldest, and I don't want to play desert island. But I'll show you my chickens," she would add, with eager politeness.

Sometimes, if Miss Annie were not in the room, we would hear Miss Harriet tell some story about her mischievousness, and our mothers would sigh and smile and say, "Poor dear!" Our mothers never said "poor dear!" about us when we did such things. If one of us Old Chester children had spoken out in church as Miss Harriet said Miss Annie did once, and told Dr. Lavendar that he was telling a story when he read in the morning lesson that the serpent talked to Eve – "because," said Miss Annie, "snakes can't talk" – if we had done such a dreadful thing, we should have been taken home and whipped and sent to bed without any supper, and probably the whole of the third chapter of Genesis to learn by heart. We should not have been "poor things!" This was very confusing to Old Chester youth until we grew older and understood. Then, instead of being puzzled, we shrunk a little and stayed close to our mothers, listening to Miss Harriet's stories of Miss Annie with strange interest and repulsion, or staring furtively at the little old woman, who laughed often and had a way of running about like a girl, and of smoothing back her gray hair from her temples with a fluttering gesture, and of putting up her lip and crying when she was angry or frightened or when she saw anything being hurt. Miss Annie could never bear to see anything hurt; she would not let us kill spiders, and she made us walk in the grass instead of on the brick path, because the ants came up between the bricks, and she was afraid we would step on them.

"Annie is very kind-hearted," Miss Harriet used to tell our mothers. "She can't bear my traps."

Miss Harriet's traps were her passion; her interest in taxidermy had come to her from her father, and though she had not been able to add anything of real value to Mr. Hutchinson's collection, her work was thoroughly well done; and she even made a fair sum of money each year by sending her squirrels and doves to town for the Christmas trade.

But more important than the money was the wholesome out-of-door life her little business entailed, which had given her her vigorous body and sane mind. She needed both to live with this gray-haired woman, whose mind was eleven or twelve years old. It was not a bad mind for eleven or twelve, Willy King used to say. Old Miss Annie had a sort of crude common-sense; she could reason and determine as well as any other twelve-year-old child – indeed, with an added shrewdness of experience that sixty years of bodily age made inevitable. She knew, innocently, much of life that other children were guarded from knowing; she knew death, too, but with no horror – perhaps as we were meant to know it – something as natural as life itself, and most of all as a release from pain. For old Annie knew pain and feared it as only the body in which the soul is not awake can fear it. She wept at the sight of blood and moaned when she heard a squirrel squeak in the trap; she shivered with passionate expectation of relief when Miss Harriet's kindly chloroform brought peace to fluttering wings or beating claws. When some soft, furry creature, hurt in the trap, relaxed into happy sleep in the thick, sweet smell that came out of Miss Harriet's big bottle, Miss Annie would laugh for joy, the tears of misery still wet upon her wrinkled cheeks.

"Don't come into my shop," Miss Harriet used to say, laughing and impatient, when Miss Annie would follow her into the room in the barn where she did her work – "don't come in here, and then you won't see things that hurt your feelings."

But Annie, smoothing her hair back from her temples with a curious, girlish gesture, would only shake her head and sidle closer to her sister, the young, guileless eyes in the withered face full of protest and appeal. Her horror of pain lost Miss Harriet many a fine specimen; for, in her pity for the trapped creatures, Annie, noiselessly, like some Indian hunter, used to follow on her sister's footsteps through the woods, lifting the baits out of the traps, or if she found a snared creature unhurt, letting it go, and then creeping home, frightened at Miss Harriet's anger, which, if she discovered the old child's naughtiness, fell like a thunderbolt, and then cleared into patient amusement, as a black shower brightens into sunshine. The big, kind woman with a man's mind could not be angry at this poor creature; so she did her duty by her and tried not to think about her. She went her way, and set her traps, and prepared her few specimens, brushing Annie or any other annoyance aside with careless good-nature.

"Don't think about unpleasant things," she used to say, in her loud, cheerful voice. "The trouble with you doctors and ministers," she told Dr. Lavendar, "is that you make people think about their insides. It's stomachs with Willy and souls with you. Nobody ought to know that they have a stomach or a soul. I don't. A tree don't. And there isn't an oak in Old Chester that isn't pleasanter than Mrs. Drayton. Yet she's always fussing about her insides – spiritual and material."

"It's when you don't have 'em that you fuss," Dr. Lavendar said; "the trouble isn't too much soul, it's too little. And I guess it's the same with stomachs."

"Then you say Mrs. Drayton has no soul?" Miss Harriet said, pleasantly.

"I never said anything of the sort," said Dr. Lavendar.

As for Miss Harriet, she went on to Willy King's office, prepared, as usual, to make him as uncomfortable as she could. But she never put Willy out. Her flings at his profession tickled him immensely, and if now and then the good, honest William practised, as Miss Harriet said, a few of the tricks of his trade, he was not averse to sharing their humor with some one who could appreciate it.

"So you have that Drayton cat on your hands again?" Miss Harriet said, plumping herself down in William's own chair in front of his office table so that she could pick up and examine what she called his "riffraff." ("Do open your windows, William. I don't see how you can be so shut up. Po-o-o! how can people live so much in-doors?")

"Well," said William, doing as he was bid, "she enjoys my visits and I enjoy her checks. I don't complain."

"That's like the profession," said Miss Harriet; "you put your hands in our pockets whenever you get a chance. Well, you'll get nothing out of my pocket, William, for there's nothing in it."

"Miss Harriet," said William, chuckling – "you won't tell anybody, will you? But Mrs. – well, I won't name names; that's not professional – "

"Call her a 'Female,'" said Miss Harriet.

"Well, a Female sent for me on Tuesday, in a dreadful hurry; I must come, 'right off! quick!' I was just sitting down to breakfast, but of course I ran – "

"Martha must have been pleased?"

"I ran; and arrived, winded. There was – the Female, at her breakfast. 'Oh,' she said, 'doctor, the baby has slept right through from six last night, and he hasn't wakened up yet. I am afraid there is something the matter with his little brain.'"

"William, if you didn't say that there was something the matter with her little brain – "

"I didn't," William said, grimly, "because she hasn't any. Now, Miss Harriet, let's talk about yourself; it's pleasanter."

"Oh, there was not the slightest occasion to come to see you. But I said I would, and here I am. I suppose you'll send me a bill as long as my arm. Do you have a system of charges, Willy? So much for a look over your glasses? So much for that solemn cough? I suppose you grade all your tricks. Now work off the most expensive ones on me; I propose to get the worth of my money, young man."

"Thought you said you weren't going to pay any bills?" William reminded her; and then refused to be side-tracked any longer, but asked question after question, bringing her up once or twice with a sharp turn. "Don't joke now, please, Miss Harriet. Be as exact as you can. Is this condition thus, or so – ?" And when he got through with his questions, he took up the joking rather heavily.

"You're so faithless about pills," he said, "that I'm not going to give you any."

"What! no pills?" said Miss Harriet.

William King laughed awkwardly. "Not a pill! I don't see any condition which warrants them: but – "

"What did I tell you? There's nothing the matter, and you just dragged me here to give your office a busy look."

"I didn't suppose you'd see through it," said Willy King. "But, Miss Harriet, I – I don't feel quite satisfied. I – do you know I've a great mind to get a man in Mercer to look you over? I want you to go up with me to-morrow and see him."

"Nonsense!"

"No, truly," he said; "I am not satisfied, Miss Harriet."

"But what do you mean?" she insisted, sharply. "There's nothing the matter with me. You said yourself I didn't need any medicine. Give me some opiate to stop this – this discomfort when it comes on, and I'll be all right."

"You can't bear opiates," he said, bluntly; "your heart won't stand them. Don't you remember the time you broke your ankle and I tried morphine – a baby dose – to give you some relief? You gave me a scare, I can tell you."

Miss Harriet was silent. Then: "I've known my heart wasn't right for two years. But – "

"Oh, your heart doesn't give me any concern – if you don't take liberties with it. Perhaps it isn't quite as good as it was thirty years ago, but – "

"Ah, I lost it to you then, Willy. You were a sweet little fellow when you came into my class. Do you remember once when – "

"Miss Harriet, you've got to go to Mercer with me to-morrow," William King interrupted, quietly. "I hope there's nothing much out of the way. I hope not. I – I believe not. But I'm not sure. We'll go up and see Greylord and find out. He'll give you some pills, maybe," he ended, and laughed and got up. "Now I'm off to the cat, Miss Harriet."

And Miss Harriet, to her astonishment, found herself dismissed before she had made the boy tell her what he was afraid of. "He is a boy," she said to herself. "Of course he wouldn't be apt to know what was the matter. I ought to have gone to see some Mercer man to begin with. I remember when Willy was born."

III

When they came out of the Mercer doctor's door William King's fresh face had gone white, but Miss Harriet walked smiling. At the foot of the steps the doctor paused and stood an instant leaning on the hand-rail, as though for support and to get his breath. Miss Harriet looked at him with concern. "Why, Willy!" she said.