"Certainly. You are always a dear; but—I wish I had known you were coming."
Ethel raised her brows, and a slight edge came into her voice.
"If you don't want me, Alice, I can go home in the morning."
Dimly aware that her cousin was fencing with an invisible adversary, nevertheless Alice Mellen was too tired, that night, to range herself upon the side of that adversary. As far as she was concerned, Ethel had dropped upon her like a bolt from the blue. She was too busy, too absorbed in her patients to give more than a passing thought to even her most intimate cousin. And besides, Weldon—She pulled herself together sharply.
"Of course I want you, Cooee dear. It is only a bit sudden, and I am trying to think what to do with you."
Now and then Ethel turned wayward. This was one of the times.
"If you didn't know what to do with me, Alice, then why did you ask me to come?"
"But I didn't," Alice responded, too astonished to modify her denial into a polite form of fibbing.
Ethers tone was gently superior.
"Oh, yes; you did."