“Ah! I know you’ve some final message for me, and you went round to my rooms, and Jervis told you I’d come on here.”
She was quite a different Ellida from the plaintive lady in the Park. Her lips were parted, her eyes sparkled, and she held her arms behind her back as if she were expecting a dog to jump up at her.
“Ah! You think you know everything, Mr. Toto,” she said; “but, je vous le donne en mille, you don’t know what I’ve come to tell you.”
“I know it’s one of two things,” Grimshaw said, smiling: “Either Kitty’s spoken, or else Katya has.”
“Oh, she’s more than spoken,” Ellida cried out. “She’s coming. In three days she’ll be here.”
Robert Grimshaw reflected for a long time.
“You did what you said you would?” he asked at last.
“I did what I said I would,” she repeated. “I appealed to her sense of duty. I said that, if she was so good in the treatment of obscure nervous diseases—and you know the head-doctor-man over there said she was as good a man as himself—it was manifestly her duty, her duty to mother’s memory, to take charge of mother’s only descendant—that’s Kitty—and this is her answer: She’s coming—she’s coming with a patient from Philadelphia.... Oh! she’s coming. Katya’s coming again. Won’t it make everything different?”
She pulled Robert Grimshaw by the buttonhole over to the window, and began to speak in little sibilant whispers.
And it came into Dudley Leicester’s head to think that, if Katya Lascarides was so splendid in the treatment of difficult cases, she might possibly be able to advise him as to some of the obscure maladies from which he was certain that he suffered.