Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child’s about to weep.
“Oh, dear Godfather!” she cried, as she flung herself on him; “I’m so glad you’ve come! I never wanted so much to see you!”
He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. “Good gracious, my dear!” he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated, “anybody’d think you were the patient I came to see.”
His voice, though high, was very sweet—a quality that made it always sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent, dropping his r’s, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile: “If you’ll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I’ll shake you for being so foolish. You needn’t be alarmed about your mother.”
Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon him. “Why, how awful!” she accused herself, horrified. “I’d forgotten Mother!”
Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. “I will climb up on a chair to shake you,” he continued cheerfully, “if already, in less than twenty-four hours, you’re indulging in nerves, as these broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate.”
He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but he flowed steadily on.
“I can’t diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I do your mother, so you’ll have to give me some notion of what’s the occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless Lilliputian godfather.” He made a confident gesture toward the upper part of the house with his fan. “About your mother—I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It’s not so bad as it seems when you’ve got the right doctor. I’ve practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can’t spring anything new on me. I’ve taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from table-cloths to bare tops, through portière inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through art-nouveau prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her.”
He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change of manner: “But what’s the matter with you?”
Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder. “I—why, I—just—” she hesitated, “why, I don’t know what is the matter with me.” She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the world.