"Quite so. And you mustn't think that I'm going to allow my personal feelings to interfere with my action in the matter. The Major is my friend, and I have a great regard for the poor old rector, in spite of his suffering from bronchitis. Also I like the people of Ballymoy, and I'm ready to help them in any way I can. So, whatever opinion I have formed of Simpkins, I'm going to deal with him precisely as if he were my personal enemy."
"What do you mean to do to him?" said the doctor. "You were speaking this minute of a post mortem."
"It won't come to that," said Meldon, "unless you boggle over the death certificate. But the precise details of my scheme I must keep to myself for the present, merely saying that I shall be severe with him. I couldn't, in fact, be severer if I caught him throwing stones at my infant daughter."
"Is that the one the Major stood for?" said Doyle. "He was talking to me about her. A fine child she is by all accounts."
"She was a fine child," said Meldon, "until she got the whooping-cough. Since then she's been wakeful at night.—By the way, doctor, what do you think is the proper way to feed a child that has the whooping-cough? At the present time she's living chiefly on a kind of yellow drink made up out of a powdery stuff out of a tin which tastes like biscuits when it's dry. Would you say now that was a good food for her?"
"You can rear a child," said the doctor, "whether it has the whooping-cough or not, on pretty near anything, so long as you give it enough of whatever it is you do give it."
"I'm glad to hear you say that," said Meldon; "for my wife has a notion that food ought to be weighed out by ounces, so that the child wouldn't get too much at a time."
"Did she get that out of a book?"
"She did—a little book with a pink cover on it. Do you know it?"
"I do not; but if I were you I'd burn it."