“Not for all the world,” said Miss Gale. “Make a bundle of it for me to take home. It is only poison in the hands of ignoramuses. It is most sovereign medicine. I shall make tinctures, and check many a sharp ill with it. Given in time, it cuts down fever wonderfully; and when you check the fever, you check the disease.”
Soon after this Miss Gale said she had not come to stop; she was on her way to Taddington to buy lint and German styptics, and many things useful in domestic surgery. “For,” said she, “the people at Hillstoke are relenting; at least, they run to me with their cut fingers and black eyes, though they won't trust me with their sacred rheumatics. I must also supply myself with vermifuges till the well is dug, and so mitigate puerile puttiness and internal torments.”
The other ladies were not sorry to get rid of an irrelevant zealot, who talked neither love, nor dress, nor anything that reaches the soul.
So Zoe said, “What, going already?” and having paid that tax to politeness, returned to the house with alacrity.
But the doctress would not go without her Wolf's-bane, Aconite ycleped.
The irrelevant zealot being gone, the true business of the mind was resumed; and that is love-making, or novelists give us false pictures of life, and that is impossible.
As the doctress drove from the front door, Lord Uxmoor emerged from the library—a coincidence that made both girls smile; he hoped Miss Vizard was not too tired to take another turn.
“Oh no!” said Zoe: “are you, Fanny?”
At the first step they took, Severne came round an angle of the building and joined them. He had watched from the balcony of his bedroom.
Both men looked black at each other, and made up to Zoe. She felt uncomfortable, and hardly knew what to do. However, she would not seem to observe, and was polite, but a little stiff, to both.