The Doctor's face brightened irrelevantly. "Is she a Boston young lady?" he queried.
"Oh, yes," beamed Stanton.
"Good!" said the Doctor. "Then of course she can keep some sort of an eye on you. I'd like to see her. I'd like to talk with her—give her just a few general directions as it were."
A flush deeper than any mere love-embarrassment spread suddenly over Stanton's face.
"She isn't here," he acknowledged with barely analyzable mortification. "She's just gone south."
"Just gone south?" repeated the Doctor. "You don't mean—since you've been sick?"
Stanton nodded with a rather wobbly grin, and the Doctor changed the subject abruptly, and busied himself quickly with the least bad-tasting medicine that he could concoct.
Then left alone once more with a short breakfast and a long morning, Stanton sank back gradually into a depression infinitely deeper than his pillows, in which he seemed to realize with bitter contrition that in some strange, unintentional manner his purely innocent, matter-of-fact statement that Cornelia "had just gone south" had assumed the gigantic disloyalty of a public proclamation that the lady of his choice was not quite up to the accepted standard of feminine intelligence or affections, though to save his life he could not recall any single glum word or gloomy gesture that could possibly have conveyed any such erroneous impression to the Doctor.