“A humble bard presents his respects to my Lady Marechal Niel, and begs her to step down to the gate for about two minutes.”
The note was handed to Ruth early the next morning as she stood in the kitchen beating up eggs for an omelette for her mother’s breakfast. A smile of mingled surprise and amusement overspread her face as she read; instinctively turning the card, she saw, “Herbert Kemp, M. D.,” in simple lithograph.
“Do I look all right, Mary?” she asked hurriedly, placing the bowl on the table and half turning to the cook as she walked to the door. Mary deliberately placed both hands on her hips and eyed her sharply.
“And striped flannel dresses and hairs in braids,” she began, as she always did, as if continuing a thought, “being nice, pretty flannel and nice, pretty braids, Miss Ruth do look sweet-like, which is nothing out of the common, for she always do!”
The last was almost shouted after Ruth, who had run from the cook’s prolixity.
As she hurried down the walk, she recognized the doctor’s carriage, containing the doctor himself with Bob in state beside him. Two hands went up to two respective hats as the gate swung behind her, and she advanced with hand extended to Bob.
“You are looking much better,” she exclaimed heartily, shaking the rather bashfully outstretched hand; “your first outing, is it not?”
“Yes, lady.” It had been impossible for her to make him call her by name.
“He elected to pay his first devoirs to the Queen of Roses, as he expressed it,” spoke up Kemp, with his disengaged hand on the boy’s shoulder, and looking with a puzzled expression at Ruth. Last night she had been a young woman; this morning she was a young girl; it was only after he had driven off that he discovered the cause lay in the arrangement of her hair.
“Thank you, Bob; presently I expect to have you paying me a visit on foot, when we can come to a clearer understanding about my flower-beds.”