As for Quin, he found, to his surprise, that he was enjoying his new quarters quite as much as he had the old ones. Madam was a never-ending source of amusement and interest to him, and Miss Isobel and Miss Enid soon had each her individual appeal. He liked the swish of their silk petticoats, and the play of their slim white hands about the coffee-tray. He liked their super-feminine delicacies of speech and motion, and the flattering interest they began to take in all his affairs.
Miss Isobel developed a palpitating concern for his spiritual welfare and invited him to go to church with her. She even introduced him to the minister with proud reference to his distinguished grandfather, and basked in the reflected glory.
Quin did not take kindly to church. He considered that he had done his full duty by it in the first fourteen years of his life, when he, along with the regenerate heathen, had been forced to attend five services every Sunday in the gloomy chapel in the compound at Nanking. But if Eleanor's aunt had asked him to accompany her to the gates of hell instead of the portals of heaven, he would have acquiesced eagerly. So strenuously did he lift his voice in the familiar hymns of his youth that he was promptly urged to join the choir, an ordeal whose boredom was mitigated only during the few moments when the collection was taken up and he and the tenor could bet on which deacon would make his round first.
Not for years had Miss Isobel had such thrilling occupation as that of returning Ezra Quinby's grandson to the spiritual fold. In spite of the fact that Quin was a fairly decent chap already, whose worst vices were poker and profanity, she persisted in regarding him as a brand which she had been privileged to snatch from the burning.
What gave him a yet more intimate claim upon her was the fact that his heart and lungs were still troublesome, and with any over-exertion on his part, or a sudden change in the weather, his chest became very sore and his racking cough returned. At such times Miss Isobel was in her glory. She would put him to bed with hot-water bottles and mustard plasters and feed him hot lemonade. Quin took kindly to the coddling. No one had fussed over him like that since his mother died, and he was touchingly grateful.
"Say, you'd be a wonder out at the hospital," he said to her on one of these occasions. "I wish some of those fellows with the flu could have you to look after them."
Miss Isobel's long, sallow face with its dark-ringed eyes lit up for a moment.
"There is nothing I should like better," she said. "But of course it's out of the question."
"Why?"
"Mother doesn't approve of us doing any work at the camp. She did make an exception in the case of my niece, but Eleanor was so insistent. Sister and I try never to oppose mother's wishes. It cuts us off from a great many things; but then, I contend that our first duty is to her."