“Drat that child!” said Mrs. Sessions almost viciously. “James, I’ll give your boy Joseph an earful. He’s a fretful, suspicious fellow, and if ’twa’n’t for his father and his son I’d nurse him with a field battery, I would.”
But she marched into the cottage. She turned Battle Jimmie out to talk to Dad. She changed bandages and tenderly smoothed Joseph’s head, through which the pains were shooting like heat lightning, and on the little old cannon-ball stove in the corner made him toast out of a piece of army hardtack she found and split.
Then she sat down beside the cot and straightway began:
“Joseph—I s’pose you’re ‘Mr. Brinton’ to them that works for you; but I’m older than you, my dear, besides being your nurse. And I want to tell you while I have the chance that if you weren’t so badly wounded I’d want to take and spank you like a house afire for always being so snippy to that splendid father of yours. Why, if I wasn’t just an old, old woman, I’d be tempted to fall in love with him right here on the spot, I would.”
She chuckled comfortably and patted the wounded man’s hand. And right there Joseph Brinton made a mistake which, if duplicated in his business, would have ruined the same beyond recall.
We all of us, when we are ill, feel that the world owes us the privilege of being querulous about our pet grievances; and Joseph now lifted his voice and complained:
“I can’t understand why you make all this fuss over my father. If it hadn’t been for the trouble I’ve had all these years in caring for him, and the shame he’s so often brought on me—”
Emily Sessions changed instantly from a kindly and wise, though easy-going, nurse into a small, almost youthful, spitfire.
“D’ you ever see a Newfoundland dog?” she snapped.
“Why, yes,” he said wonderingly.