The Uncle did not come in to tea. Only Mrs. Wilmington looked in for a moment to say that Rupert’s cold was worse, and that they had better not see him again that day.
‘And please don’t be up and down stairs all the time in your heavy boots,’ she added.
‘Our feet don’t seem to please her to-day, somehow, whatever we put them in,’ said Charlotte. ‘I wish we could give her something to make her like us. We might just as well be black-beetles.’
‘What we’ve got to do,’ said Caroline, pouring out milk, ‘is to get Rupert better. I felt all the time in the drawing-room how hateful it is for him to be out of things like this. If we could work something out of the three books, I’m sure he would get all right in no time. A threefold spell; that’s what we want.’
‘Well, we can’t have it then,’ said Charlotte. ‘I should think two books would be ample. It’s only a cold he’s got. It might want the three if it was plague or wounds or jauntry—jaundice, or whatever it is.’
They spread out the book on the table as soon as tea was cleared away, and put their heads together over the yellow pages. But it was some time before they could find anything that seemed as though it could possibly do Rupert any good.
‘What a beastly lot of herbs there are in the world,’ Charlotte remarked. And Charles reminded her that they called any old flower an herb in books.
‘What I can’t understand,’ he added, ‘is how people can possibly have so many disgusting things the matter with them—palsy and leprosy and quinsy, and all the other things as well.’
‘I don’t suppose people have them now,’ said Caroline consolingly. ‘Aunt Emmeline says Hygiene has got on so nicely, people don’t have nearly such awful things the matter with them as they used. Look at the Black Death in fourteen hundred something. You never hear of black deaths now.’