“There’s no knowing how that gas may have affected her heart.”
Georgina made a face at the first speech, but the second one made her lie down languidly on the sofa with her finger on her pulse. She was half persuaded that there was something wrong with the way it beat, and was about to ask faintly if she couldn’t have a little blackberry cordial with her lunch, when she heard Richard’s alley call outside and Captain Kidd’s quick bark.
She started up, forgetting all about the cordial and her pulse, and was skipping to the front door when Tippy hurried in from the dining-room and reached it first. She had a piece of an old coffee sack in her hand.
“Here!” she said abruptly to Richard, who was so surprised at the sudden opening of the door that he nearly fell in against her.
“You catch that dog and hold him while I wipe his feet. I can’t have any dirty quadruped like that, tracking up my clean floors.”
Georgina looked at the performance in amazement. Tippy scrubbing away at Captain Kidd’s muddy paws till all four of them were clean, and then actually letting him come into the house and curl up on the hearth! Tippy, who never touched dogs except with the end of a broom! She could scarcely believe what her own eyes told her. She and Richard must have had a “close call,” indeed, closer than either of them realized, to make such a wonderful change in Tippy.
And the change was towards Richard, too. She had never seemed to like him much better than his dog. She blamed him for taking the cream bottles when they played pirate, and she thought it made little girls boisterous and rude to play with boys, and she wondered at Barby’s letting Georgina play with him. Several times she had done her wondering out loud, so that Georgina heard her, and wanted to say things back--shocking things, such as Rosa said to Joseph. But she never said them. There was always that old silver porringer, sitting prim and lady-like upon the sideboard.
Things were different to-day. After the dog’s paws were wiped dry Tippy asked Richard how he felt after the accident, and she asked it as if she really cared and wanted to know. And she brought in a plate of early summer apples, the first in the market, and told him to help himself and put some in his pocket. And there was the checker-board if they wanted to play checkers or dominoes. Her unusual concern for their entertainment impressed Georgina more than anything else she could have done with the seriousness of the danger they had been in. She felt very solemn and important, and thanked Tippy with a sweet, patient air, befitting one who has just been brought up from the “valley of the shadow.”
The moment they were alone Richard began breathlessly:
“Say. On the way here I went by that place where we buried the pouch, and what do you think? The markers are out of sight and the whole place itself is buried--just filled up level. What are we going to do about it?”