"Yes, indeed!" She doubled up her arm boyishly to exhibit the swelling biceps.
He nodded. "Excellent. Then we must make him a ladies' chair, you and I. Fortunately he is not a large man."
Channing, however, was heavier than he looked. He was only conscious enough to keep his arms over their shoulders, otherwise unable to help them at all. They made slow progress. Frequently they had to put him down and rest, more for the stranger's sake than for Jacqueline's.
"I fear my biceps are less creditable than yours," he smiled once, panting a little. "Or it is the breath, perhaps. One grows older, unfortunately."
As he spoke he coughed slightly, and Jacqueline looked with quick understanding at his thin face. She had heard such a cough before. The White Plague was one of the enemies which Mrs. Kildare fought untiringly and unceasingly in her domain.
"I am afraid this effort is not good for you," she murmured.
He shrugged deprecatingly, as if to say, "What does it matter?"
The gesture was oddly familiar to Jacqueline. She had seen Philip Benoix shrug in just that way. Indeed, there were other things about this man that seemed oddly familiar. She looked at him, puzzled. The lantern showed him dressed in coarse jeans, unkempt, unshaven. Yet his clear, well-modulated, slightly accented speech proved him no genuine mountaineer. Perhaps the cough accounted for his presence in the mountains.—But his appearance of familiarity?
Suddenly Jacqueline placed him. It was the man she had seen outside the window of the meeting-house, listening so absorbedly to Philip's sermon.
"You're the school-teacher, aren't you?" she asked.