"Oh, Keithie, Keithie, my poor blind boy! What will you do? How will you ever live? Never to see again, never to see again! Oh, my poor boy, my poor blind boy!"
Susan, at the door, flung both hands above her head, then plunged down the stairs.
"Fool! FOOL! FOOL!" she snarled at the biscuits in the oven. "Don't you know ANYTHING?" Yet the biscuits in the oven were puffing up and browning beautifully, as the best of biscuits should.
When Susan's strident call for supper rang through the hall, Mrs. Colebrook was with her brother in the studio. She had been bemoaning and bewailing the cruel fate that had overtaken "that dear boy," and had just asked for the seventh time how he could stand it, when from the hall below came:
"Supper's ready, supper's ready,
Hurry up or you'll be late.
Then you'll sure be cross an' heady,
If there's nothin' left to ate."
"Daniel, what in the world is the meaning of that?" she interrupted sharply.
"That? Oh, that is Susan's—er—supper bell," shrugged the man, with a little uneasy gesture.
"You mean that you've heard it before?—that that is her usual method of summoning you to your meals?"
"Y-yes, when she's good-natured," returned the man, with a still more uneasy shifting of his position. "Come, shall we go down?"
"DANIEL! And you stand it?"