“To find out if it’s interesting,” explained Babe, and told the whole story of the dispute about the road.
The old gentleman laughed heartily, and then he sighed. “Wish I could get as excited as that about this milk-and-water scenery. Well, run along and find your tarn,—all but you,” indicating Betty. “You’re too tired to go any further. You’d better stay right here with me until the others get back.”
“I am tired,” admitted Betty, blushing furiously, “but I think I’d better go on. You said you were taking a walk, and I don’t want to keep you——”
“I said my doctor told me to take walks,” interposed the old gentleman irascibly. “At present I am sitting here enjoying the view, or, to speak quite truthfully, staring at the view without seeing it, and wishing I were back in New York.”
“But Betty wants to see the tarn too,” urged Babe, who resented such autocratic methods. “Come on, Betty. You can rest all the afternoon in the coach.”
Betty half rose, hesitated, and then something in the rather wistful smile that the old gentleman gave her from under his bushy eyebrows made her decide to stay.
“I’m afraid I am too tired to enjoy seeing anything more, even if it’s interesting,” she told the girls. “So if you’re sure you won’t mind waiting, sir—it’s rather lonely here to stay alone.”
“I assure you it will be only a pleasure to wait with you,” declared the old gentleman with fine, old-fashioned courtesy. “Solitary walks are a dull sort of amusement.”
So while the rest went in pursuit of the tarn Betty talked to the old gentleman. He was traveling alone, it seemed, for his health, and he hated traveling, hated doctors, and despised himself for having let one of them bundle him off willy-nilly, like a molly-coddle old woman who had nothing in the world to do but count her pulse and worry about her digestion.
“But don’t you think you’d get well faster if you just made up your mind to it and tried to enjoy things and have a good time?” asked Betty timidly.