Nobody was visible. Mrs. Simmons deposited her umbrella in a corner, gave her boots a good rubbing on the mat,—for the heavy rain of the storm had left mud,—and peered cautiously into the parlour.
Isaac Meads sat there alone, his head dropping forward on his chest in sleepy style, and his lower jaw falling with its wonted unhappiness of expression. Mrs. Simmons drew back, not feeling as if she cared to have speech with the old man. But a second impulse came over her, and she stepped forward. He looked so lonely and miserable; might he not be in need of a kind word?
"Good evening to you, Mr. Meads," she said, in her full pleasant tones. "I've come to ask how your little girl is." Mrs. Simmons herself was so large a person that she always thought of Daisy as a "little girl," and in a time of illness such thoughts naturally find expression in words.
Isaac Meads woke up very slowly out of his fit of drowsiness, and stared blankly at his visitor.
"Is your little girl any better by this time?" asked Mrs. Simmons, pitching her voice higher. She never could quite understand whether his slowness of understanding sprang from stupidity or deafness. "I haven't been able to get her out of my mind all day, poor little dear, and I'm sure I couldn't rest without hearing how she is before night."
"She hadn't got no business to go and get struck with lightning," growled Isaac Meads, enough awake to bring out the uppermost ideas in his feeble old mind. "It's an awful expense—doctor and nurse and all! It's just awful; and I was a-thinking I wouldn't put up no longer with having a girl. It would have been a saving."
"Why, you don't mean to say—," began Mrs. Simmons.
Then she stopped, and stood looking at him, her clear strong sense coming to the conclusion that the old man was crazy. So he was, with the craziness of money greed.
"Somebody'd ought to have seen after her," said Isaac Meads. "It's all along of them school feasts. She shan't go to none of them again."
"She isn't like to go anywhere yet awhile, judging by all accounts," said Betsy Simmons, her womanly indignation mastering other sensations. "Doctor and nurse an expense! Well, I never! What's your money good for, if it isn't to be spent on her? Isn't she your own flesh and blood,—the only thing you have got belonging to you, and the sweetest girl as ever was? I never! If that's all you've got to say about the matter, I'm ashamed of you, Mr. Meads—downright ashamed. Why didn't you go to the school feast yourself to see after her? Wasn't everybody else in the same danger—least-ways, except for the pitchfork? Why, dear me, do you think trouble is never to come to you, as well as to other people?"