Mr. Dolloway shook his head dolefully, but a genuine distress was in the gesture. “’Tain’t your mother, Miss Beatrice. It’s that pesky, dear little brother of yours.”
“What’s happened him? Anything new? The hens?”
“Hens! If it was only hens! But hens it isn’t this time. It’s roofs an’ cisterns an’ bangs an’ black-an’-blues. If he ain’t dead—”
Poor Bonny did not pause to remember that she was a salaried employee, but, without leave or license, darted from the house and across the fields with an aching heart.
CHAPTER XV.
STREAKS OF HUMAN NATURE.
“IT must be something dreadful this time! Roland has left his ploughing, and the old horse is walking about as she pleases. The men are not working upon the cistern, and— Can it be he is drowned?”
These thoughts flashed through the sister’s mind as she hurried homeward, past the field of sweet-smelling, freshly turned sods where her brother’s plough stood idly in the furrow; and as she burst into the sitting-room her face was white and her breath well spent.
But nothing so very dreadful met her gaze. Robert was, indeed, lying upon the lounge well wrapped in blankets, but his dark eyes were the first to discover Bonny’s entrance, and his voice the one to demand: “What you home for, Bon?”
“Why—why—you precious darling! Aren’t you killed?”
“Wull—wull—I guess not! What’s the matter with you, anyway? What’s the matter with everybody? Can’t a feller slide offen a roof ’ithout stirrin’ up the hull neighborhood, I’d like to know!”