A hand was stealing inside his, and he had to stop and look down again. ‘Do you think you could go and see Kit next time he is ill?’ asked Babs, appealingly. ‘It isn’t nice to have a beast for a doctor, when you’re ill, is it?’
The doctor went on looking down at her with an odd sort of smile on his face. ‘That reminds me,’ he said–though how it reminded him the child could not for the moment imagine–‘that your cousin Miss Urquhart charged me with a message for you. She sent you her love and promised to write soon. I hope I have given it correctly.’
‘Oh!’ cried Barbara, with great excitement. ‘Do you know Jill?’ The doctor kept hold of her hand and nodded. ‘And Auntie Anna? And the boys–all of them? Then you must know Kit!’
‘Yes,’ said Dr. Hurst, grimly. ‘I was the beast.’
Then he stooped and kissed her cheek very stiffly, as if he were not used to kissing people; and then he went away. Like Ruth Oliver, he had found it difficult to feel nervous of the youngest girl in the school.
Barbara climbed on the window-seat, and flattened her nose against the window-pane, and watched the lamps of the doctor’s trap receding down the drive. ‘I like doctors; don’t you, Miss Finlayson?’ she inquired, when that lady came back into the study.
Miss Finlayson agreed that she liked doctors very much indeed, and she began to write something in a big book, while Babs knelt on the window-seat and stared out into the rain and the darkness. Suddenly she jumped down from her perch with a cry of dismay.
‘What’s the matter now?’ asked the head-mistress, absently.
‘I must have called him a beast!’ gasped Barbara.
‘I think I heard something like it,’ observed Miss Finlayson, still writing.