“He’ll come up on deck,” said Miss Thompkins, disclosing her teeth in an inscrutable smile that the moonbeams made more strange than it actually was. “Like to know how I know? Sure you’d like to know, Mrs. Simplicity?” Her beads rattled above Audrey’s insignificant upturned nose. “Isn’t a yacht the queerest little self-contained state you ever visited? It’s as full of party politics as Massachusetts; and that’s some. Well, I didn’t use all my medicine you gave me. Didn’t need it. So I’ve shared it with him. I got the empty packet with all the instructions on it, and I put two of my tablets in it, and if he hasn’t swallowed them by this time my name isn’t Anne Tuckett Thompkins.”
“But you don’t mean he’s been——”
“Audrey, you’re making a noise like a goose. ’Course I do.”
“But how did you manage to——”
“I gave them to Mr. Price, with instructions to leave them by the—er—bedside. Mr. Price is a friend. I hope I’ve made that plain these days to everybody, including Mr. Gilman. Mr. Price is a good sample of what painters are liable to come to after they’ve found out they don’t care for the smell of oil-tubes. I knew him when he always said ‘Puvis’ instead of ‘Puvis de Chavannes.’ He’s cured now. If I hadn’t happened to know he’d be on board I shouldn’t have dared to come. He’s my lifebuoy.”
“But I assure you, Tommy, Mr. Gilman refused the stuff from me. He did.”
“Oh! Dove! Wood-pigeon! Of course he refused it. He was bound to. Owner of a two-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht taking a remedy for sea-sickness in public on the two-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht! The very idea makes you shiver. But he’ll take it down there. And he won’t ask any questions. And he’ll hide it from the doctor. And he’ll pretend, and he’ll expect everybody else to pretend, that he’s never been within a mile of the stuff.”
“Tommy, I don’t believe you.”
“And he’s a lovely man, all the same.”
“Tommy, I don’t believe you.”