“Right you are, ma’am—impatient for their doom, never thinking as how what they don’t know won’t hurt them.” Mr. Ruggle drew his pony’s head out of the greenery about the fence. “Bad news from Poplars?”
“Oh, no, not at all.” Mrs. Mearely gave him a nod that meant dismissal.
“It is only a line from my sister, Mrs. Lee, saying she can’t come to me for a week.”
“Should think you’d be looking in your own envelope, ma’am,” Mr. Ruggle hinted to Mrs. Lee. “It’s come quite a ways.”
“Not just now; I must find my other glasses first, so I shall wait some time.”
“Well, you may, but I can’t!” The nonplussed Mr. Ruggle masked his disappointment with a facetious air. “Good-day, ladies.” The over-freighted pony jogged on up the hill.
“Dear, dear, I wonder how many thousand times Mr. Ruggle has repeated to me that unpleasant ‘anecdote’ of his, as he insists on calling it.” Mrs. Lee shook her head, with a mild perplexity that any one should evince a taste for such humour.
“Dreadful person!” Rosamond concurred. “Wouldn’t you suppose that an ordinary sense of the fitness of things would keep a fat man from being morbid?”
Mrs. Lee laughed heartily.
“I’m afraid I have been guilty of a tiny fib. Although I generally use my other glasses for reading, I do not positively require them. Still I do feel that I should not be compelled to share my mail with Mr. Ruggle.” She slipped a knitting needle under the flap and opened the envelope deftly. Presently a murmur of delight caused her guest to say: