“Nothing, if you don’t think sympathy worth having.”
Ned stopped. The strong-limbed, plucky women he had got used to in Australia, and from whom he had chosen his own wife, were rather lacking in graceful feminine ways; so this pretty speech and gentle tone, coming from a girl whose spirit he admired, touched and softened him.
“What are you up to now?” he asked, gruffly enough, but not without betraying signs of a gentler feeling than he would have owned to. “I know better than to think you’d trouble your head about an old bear like me if you didn’t want to get something out of me.”
“Well, I want to get the pain out of you—and perhaps a little of the surliness too,” she added, archly.
“The first would take a doctor, and the second would take a magician.”
“Are you going to have a doctor?”
“No. I can’t go after one myself, and my establishment doesn’t include anybody I could send.”
“I’ll send for one. I’ll get one of the farm boys to go; or, if there isn’t one about, Mat Oldshaw will go, I know.”
Ned looked at her cynically.
“Poor Mat,” said he. “And to think I was fool enough myself once to run errands for a girl who thought herself as far above me as heaven from earth. When all the time she was dying of love for another chap too. Just the same—just the same.”