“You can’t tell Dr. Wells you are my chauffeur. He knows I haven’t one!”
The doctor’s footsteps were coming along the porch.
“Leave it to me,” hastily. “I’ll tell him something.”
Dr. Wells, entering hurriedly, with his little black bag in his hand and neighbourly anxiety in his heart, encountered Mrs. Mearely on her threshold, and saw no farther. He was astounded.
“Mrs. Mearely!” he exclaimed. “You are able to be up?”
Rosamond was taken aback by this greeting, not understanding for the moment that the doctor had come to her home under the impression that she herself was ill.
“Yes, certainly.—Oh, I see. But it is not I who need your services.”
“Well, I am glad of that! My boy, Peter, who answered the telephone, said I must come to you at once. I feared you had been taken seriously ill. So I hastened, as fast as possible—considering that my own indigestion was acute. I delayed only to awaken Mrs. Wells, and tell her that I had received an urgent call to your home. Dear, dear! she was greatly alarmed. Indeed, she almost insisted on coming with me, knowing that you are alone. But I couldn’t permit it. She was seized with such a fit of hiccoughs and heart-burn, poor thing, that I prevailed upon her to remain warmly in bed.”
Even his capacious lungs needed refilling with air at times, so that his philippics must eventually come to a period. Rosamond had made several useless efforts to interrupt him; now she said quickly, to prevent him from launching another fleet of parentheses:
“How kind. But, as you see, I am perfectly well. It is this gentleman who requires your services.” She led the way to the big chair, where the vagabond had settled again, perhaps because he thought that a wounded man should not appear too brisk, considering the hour and place.