Yet there was a funny thing about the draught. It seemed to Rosalie that Miss Keggs with that eager draught yet did not swallow at once but only filled her mouth to its capacity. She then swallowed very slowly and with movements of her cheeks as though she was sucking down the medicine and tasting it in every portion of her mouth. Colour came into her cheeks. The medicine certainly appeared to do her immense good.
Miss Keggs’s friendliness towards Rosalie was settled and established from that night. Thereafter it became a very regular thing for Rosalie to visit the room of Miss Keggs of an evening; and at intervals, sometimes twice a week, sometimes not three times in a month, to descend to the den of Mr. Ponders for the dark-red medicine which did Miss Keggs so much good and which she always took in that peculiar sucking way from a full mouth, one would be so long sometimes in swallowing a mouthful, beginning a sentence and then drinking and then all that time in swallowing before she completed the sentence, that she several times, by way of apology, ex-plained the reason to Rosalie. “I have to swallow it very slowly like that,” explained Miss Keggs, “because that’s the way for it to do me good. It’s my doctor’s orders.”
“It seems a business,” was Rosalie’s comment.
“Yes, it is a business,” Miss Keggs agreed.
Rosalie added, “How very lucky it is, Miss Keggs, that Mr. Ponders keeps your medicine.”
“Yes, it’s certainly very lucky,” Miss Keggs agreed.
The effect of her medicine was always to make her very complaisant.