Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. “Why, poor Maddemwaselle!” she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting. “Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as well that way—if they’ll ever look.”
Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.
Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them, “I didn’t know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him—isn’t he too comical! He must have heard our chatter—I saw him running down the walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang.”
“He hasn’t much patience with many necessary details of life,” said Mrs. Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a compliment to her brother’s widow by adding, “Whatever he would do without Julia to look after him, I’m sure none of us can imagine.”
“He is a very original character,” said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.
Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, “He’s the most killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!”
“Now, ladies,” implored Madame Boyle, “one more row—not solid—just a soupçon—”
CHAPTER XIV