In the Mist of the Mountains Part 13

"I attribute my perfect health and clear and active brain solely to the cautions I observe with my diet," he said slowly. "No meat, no drinking at meals, no bread, no puddings. There are excellent subst.i.tutes," he picked up negligently from his desk a small packet that had been sent--an advertis.e.m.e.nt sample--to him by the morning's post, and had not yet been disposed of.

Miss Bibby wrote on, glowing with fellow-feeling.

"In conclusion," he added, "I am a strict teetotaler, and I never smoke."

Then it occurred to him "Greenways" might have seen the red end of a cigar on the "Tenby" verandah, and he added, "except an occasional cigar under medical orders."

He rose from his chair and gazed pensively at his black socked feet.

Miss Bibby fluttered up at once, handed back his pen, and hurriedly tore off from the block her last written sheet.

"I can never, never thank you enough," she said, and held out to him a hand that somehow pleased him, and made him compunctious at the same time--such a white, slender, gentlewoman's hand it was.

But then he remembered his hero had not yet proposed, and a.s.suredly would not to-day after such an interruption. He told himself that she had deserved all she got, and that she would, at all events, earn the six guineas she was so eager about.

"Oh, don't mention it," he said gallantly, and turned her over to Kate, who was just coming along to satisfy herself that actual murder had not been committed.

She fluttered back one moment, however, just as he was closing the door.

"I believe interviews have to be signed as authentic by their subject, have they not?" she said; "forgive me for troubling you again."

"Oh, have they?" he said. His fountain-pen was in his hand. "Where shall I put the signature? I suppose you will copy all this out again; suppose I write on this blank slip?"

"That will do nicely," she said.

"I guarantee this to be an authentic interview, Hugh Kinross, his mark,"

he scrawled lazily across the page.

When he took his seat at the tea-table that night Kate came behind him and kissed the top of his head, an unusual mark of affection, for they were an undemonstrative couple in general.

"Dear old Hughie," she said, "you have given delight to more than one person."

"I believe I have, K," he said genially.

CHAPTER X

ANNA ENJOYS ILL-HEALTH

"Anna," said Miss Bibby, with happy eyes the next morning, "I am going to take a whole holiday to-day."

"An' about time," said Anna, "I've been wonderin' how long you could keep it up, Miss Bibby. You've not had one yet, and me half a dozen. I don't have half as much to do with those childerun as you, but if I didn't get away from them sometimes I'd get hysterics."

"I am sure they are very good children--wonderfully good, Anna," said Miss Bibby.

"Oh yes, they're good enough," said Anna, "but so uncommon lively. And talk! They keeps it up, one after the other, and sometimes all four at a time, till your head spins round like a top. I got quite giddy goin'

down to the waterfall with them yesterday, and it wasn't the steps, neither, it was just their tongues going at it, clackerty-clack all the time. What time will you be back, Miss Bibby?"

"Oh," said Miss Bibby, "I should not think of going _away_ for my holiday, Anna. Mrs. Lomax knows nothing would make me leave the children so long, while she is so far away. But since she begged me to take a day a week to myself, I am going to shut myself in my room to-day. I have very important work."

"Working him a pair of slippers, I'll undertake," ran Anna's thoughts.

But aloud she said, "Yes, you do, Miss Bibby. I'll keep them youngsters away from you; you get a good rest while you're about it."

The heartiness in her tone was due to the fact that she was about to ask for an extra special holiday for herself in a day or two to attend the Mountain Bakers' picnic at a distant waterfall.

So Miss Bibby disappeared into her room for the day, after having written down the children's meals in her painstaking fas.h.i.+on on the kitchen slate, and given the tradesmen's orders, and seen the children happily engaged in their favourite game of Swiss Family Robinson.

Anna sighed with relief; gentle as Miss Bibby was she had a way of keeping people up to the mark, and on a warm day like this, a well-executed policy of "letting things slip" appealed to the imagination.

Miss Bibby came back a moment.

"Anna," she said, "I have neglected to give Master Max and Miss Lynn their medicine, will you call them in and give it to them? I do not want to waste time."

Anna undertook the commission.

"Don't know what I'm thinking of; I forgot my own doses," she muttered as she went to the dining-room for the bottles. Max had been ordered a pleasant preparation of malt to fortify his little system during his convalescence, and Lynn an iron tonic. The other two were making such excellent recoveries nothing was needed.

Anna reached the two bottles from the cupboard, measured out with a steady hand a tablespoon of the malt, and swallowed it, then followed it by a teaspoonful of Lynn's iron. She looked at herself in the sideboard mirror as she did so. "I don't think I'm looking any better," she said mournfully.

Anna keenly enjoyed the worst of health.

She was an anaemic-looking girl with a pasty complexion, and hair several shades too light to correspond comfortably with it.

Ill-health was the only subject in life in which she took a genuine interest.

Miss Bibby supposed Anna quite a reader, so often did she find her deep in a paper, and so the girl was--of medical advertis.e.m.e.nts. The marvellous recoveries of persons like Mrs. Joseph Huggins, of Arabella Street, Chippendale, who had been given up by six leading doctors after suffering from a blood-curdling list of ailments for seventeen years, and had been cured after taking one bottle, were a source of unfailing interest to Anna.

And never did an advertis.e.m.e.nt offer free a sample bottle of any drug, no matter for what purpose, but Anna sent instantly and claimed it.

It needed nothing but the announcement on Max's malt bottle of its tissue-building qualities, and its power of restoring the waste of nature in the human frame, for the girl at once privately to take a course of the same treatment and, as the chemist's bill might have testified, from the same bottle.

Similarly with Lynn's tonic; the accompanying pamphlet said something about its invigorating powers and the restoration of red corpuscles to the blood, so Anna at once prescribed it for herself also--out of Lynn's bottle.

And Miss Bibby's Health Foods that that lady paid for out of her slender purse--Anna determined that it was these things that gave the temporary head of the house that curiously delicate clear skin of hers; so being by no means satisfied with her own complexion, she consistently a.s.sisted herself to a small quant.i.ty of each, without, it need hardly be stated, foregoing any of her hearty meals at the kitchen table with Blake the gardener.

Miss Bibby had certainly been vaguely surprised at first at the rapid lowering both of the children's medicines and her own tins, but never dreaming of suspecting so unusual a cause, soon grew entirely accustomed to it, and imagined it was the normal consumption.

Her own const.i.tution thus fortified, this morning Anna called loudly through the window for Max and Lynn to come in this instant and take their "medsuns."

Max came eagerly; he was so fond of his treacley spoonful it was a marvel he had not of his own accord jogged some one's memory and insisted upon the omission being rectified.

But Lynn's tonic embittered life for her for a considerable time before taking, as well as for several minutes afterwards, until a long drink and a chocolate removed the nauseous taste.

She was playing this morning, before Anna's call, in a mood of chastened joy.