Hugh smiled faintly toward the speaker. “Fine of you to look out for her,” he said. “Might shut the transom, nurse.”
The secretary’s full lips drew together and he glared at this self-possession. Insolence, he called it. Of course, the man was injured, but, in consideration of such hospitality as was being shown him, he might at least act promptly upon such information.
Leonard returned to Mrs. Lumbard flushed, and with the little crack in his voice that came with excitement.
“Lying there, smoking like a young nabob,” he reported. “I told him Miss Frink’s horror of tobacco, and he merely asked the nurse to close the transom. Such nerve!”
“Yes,” returned Adèle, interested, “we surely knew already that he had nerve: and isn’t he a beauty?”
“Oh, certainly,” returned the other, throwing down the clothes on a table with a vigor that suggested a wish that the owner was occupying them. “Head all bandaged but one eye, arm bundled up, a general wreck.”
“Let him smoke, then, poor thing, while Aunt Susanna is off showing Farrandale what she’s made of. It will be his last for one while.”
It was, indeed, Hugh’s last indulgence because a high fever took possession of the young adventurer that night, and for a few days Miss Frink’s physician was a busy man. She paid scant attention to her other interests until the boy was sane again; and, although she kept to the usual hours in her study, the nurse was instructed to report to her at short intervals.
“It does seem, Miss Frink, as if we ought to send for his Aunt Sukey,” said this attractive young woman on one occasion. “He calls for her incessantly.”
Miss Frink drew her features together in the sudden grimace which sent her eyeglasses off her nose.