The Motor Maids by Rose, Shamrock and Thistle Part 2

"How did you find it out?" he demanded, the humorous look deepening in his eyes.

"I chewed one of them up."

The doctor gave her a delightful smile.

"Never tell them," he said. "Let it be a little secret between you and me. Not even Feargus O'Connor knows that he was cured by a 'suggestion pellet.' For some reason it always makes people mad to know that they have been taking bread instead of medicine."

"But it was something else, wasn't it, really?"

"Just pure bread and nothing more."

"But your eyes?" she persisted.

"Just your imagination, my dear young lady," he answered, smiling again as he hurried away.

Nevertheless, in another two hours, Billie had bundled her friends into their steamer chairs on deck, and they were drinking hot broth with much relish.

It was true that the storm had subsided. The wind had died down and the sun was s.h.i.+ning cheerfully. Perhaps, after all, it was the change in the weather that had effected so complete a cure.

CHAPTER II.-LITTLE ARTHUR.

When a s.h.i.+p is small and the pa.s.sengers are few, it becomes a floating home for one family. Everybody comes to know everybody else very well indeed after the second day out. The captain is the father of the family, and there is a great deal of talk about small, unimportant things.

So it was with the s.h.i.+p which bore our Motor Maids and Miss Helen Campbell to Europe. Every morning at eleven o'clock when the steward appeared with a tray of bouillon and biscuit, certain of the s.h.i.+p's forty pa.s.sengers gathered about the Motor Maids in friendly intercourse.

At least, already it seemed every morning, because this made the second time.

Reclining lazily in steamer chairs or leaning on the deck rail, the four girls chatted with their new friends.

"As I was saying," observed Nancy to Feargus O'Connor, the young man whose dish of finnan haddie had made Elinor so ill the first day out, and who proved to be the secretary of the older man, Mr. Kalisch, "there is some mystery about him, I am sure."

"Mystery about whom?" demanded Billie from the depths of her chair.

"Mystery about little Arthur, of course."

"And who is little Arthur?" asked Mr. Kalisch.

"Little Arthur is little Arthur," replied Nancy. "We really don't know."

"You mean that horrid little boy who is always with the three men?"

asked Mrs. Alonzo Le Roy-Jones of Castlewood, Virginia.

Nancy nodded politely. She did not care for this over-dressed, high-voiced woman who talked of the Le Roy-Jones family and their past glories to anybody who would listen to her.

"But he is not horrid, mamma," put in her daughter, Marie-Jeanne Le Roy-Jones. "When you saw him crying he was suffering. He is very delicate."

"Marie-Jeanne, a Le Roy-Jones never cried from pain, no, not even when wounded on the battlefield--"

"But, mother, the Le Roy-Joneses were never on a battlefield at the age of ten--"

"Don't answer back, I beg of you, Marie. It is so _bourgeois_, so common."

Mrs. Le Roy-Jones turned coldly away from her daughter, who was a plain girl and wore her fussy clothes with a discontented air.

"Here he comes," called Feargus. "He is a funny little chap with such old ways. I talked with him a moment this morning, but his guardians are so careful they won't let any one come near him."

"Who is the child?" asked Miss Campbell, at last revived from a morning nap.

"I tell you, we don't know, Cousin. n.o.body has ever taken the trouble to look him up on the pa.s.senger list. He is called Arthur by the tall man in blue, and that's all we know."

Mr. Kalisch shook back his s.h.a.ggy hair and looked carefully at the little boy, who now approached walking between two tall young Englishmen.

Just as the child came opposite the company, he stopped and put his hand to his heart. His face turned very pale and tears came into his eyes.

The two young men were so engrossed in their conversation that they did not notice him swaying dizzily. It was Mr. Kalisch who caught him in his arms.

"Oh, my heart! My heart!" cried the little fellow.

In a moment the other pa.s.sengers had surrounded him, as people will do at such times, partly from curiosity, partly from sympathy.

"Give him air, my friends," called Mr. Kalisch, as he laid Arthur on a steamer rug that Billie had spread on the deck for the purpose.

"Where's Dr. Benton?" demanded one Englishman of the other.

"I'll run and fetch him," replied the man hurrying away.

In the meantime, Mr. Kalisch and the Englishman were kneeling beside little Arthur, who had turned as white as a corpse and very blue about the lips. The moments dragged slowly and everybody stood anxiously by in deep silence. Presently the man who had gone in search of the doctor returned.

"I can't find him," he said, "or the s.h.i.+p's surgeon, either. By Jove, what are we going to do, Bobbie?"

"Mr. Kalisch is a doctor," put in Billie.

Mr. Kalisch was already feeling the boy's heart and pulse.

"His pulse is very faint," he said.

The two men exchanged frightened glances.

Mr. Kalisch drew from his inner pocket a small medicine case and took out a phial filled with white liquid, with which he moistened the child's lips.

"Arthur," he said in a voice that seemed somehow to come from another sphere, "Arthur, are you asleep?"

The child opened his eyes and smiled.

"You feel quite well, now, don't you, my boy?"