Ross seems better. He is sleeping some hours each night without the bromide. I never heard how much of that Brown got him to take.
When I inquired how the knee was, Sam said,—
'Keeps pretty level with the arm, miss—ma'am, I should say.'
Now what does he mean by that?
There has been another thaw and everything is distinctly mucky, but yesterday, after lunch, I put on my shortest skirt and my oldest hat, the one with the pheasant wing in it that Michael likes, and we tramped over the dripping meadows to call on 'Uncle John.' 'Aunt John' opened the door. She was resplendent in black silk with a necklace of melon seeds and a pair of the most enormous pearl ear-rings, that even Cleopatra might have envied.
She invited us into the little front parlour. This room was almost entirely filled with a full-sized grand piano, which 'Uncle John' had bought at a sale cheap, owing to the fact that most of the notes were missing, 'But then,' as he explained, 'look at the case, real Hebony.'
He came in a few minutes after, looking a perfect ragamuffin in his stained overalls and battered hat, not at all a suitable mate for the resplendent vision in silk and melon seeds. The pair rather reminded me of Uncle Jasper and Aunt Constance—she dressed for dinner in all her finery and jewels and he just come in from grubbing out a foundation of a buried abbey. And 'Aunt John' looked at 'Uncle John' in much the same way that Aunt Constance looks at Uncle Jasper under the same circumstances.
'Fair caught, I am,' he exclaimed affably, shaking hands all round; 'ain't had it off yet, then?' he said to Ross by way of cheering up an invalid. And then with great pride he added, reverting to his first paragraph, 'but the missis fair makes up for it, don't she, always dressed up like a 'am bone of an afternoon is Sarah.'
'Well, mum,' he said, turning to me, 'I got your letter, and it's a fair blow, that it is; I don't say but what wall-papers ain't expensive and likely to go up, but if you could 'ave afforded the yaller with the cream stripe I think it would 'ave fair made the place. Perhaps if you wrote and told yer 'usband 'ow much better I say it would look 'e might be willing to do a bust for once, especially as you don't seem to cost 'im much in clothes,' and he glanced at my plain tweed skirt.
Here Ross tittered, as I happened to have mentioned at lunch the price I had paid for the garment in question.