“She was going to a different tea-party.” Supposing that his question was a way of politely desiring news of Miss Madison, she went on to talk of her.
“She was going to her French teacher’s, who is having a French afternoon where they’re supposed to talk nothing but French. What would I have been doing there? But Estelle is getting to talk the French language exactly as well as her own.... That reminds me. A thing I’ve wanted to tell you. If you should notice that Busteretto seems to be rather more her dog than mine, don’t you say anything, or care. The fact is Estelle loves him more than I do. That’s all there is about it. Which isn’t saying that I don’t love him. But Estelle’s silly over him, in the regular old maid way, as I tell her. When he wouldn’t eat his dinner this noon, I had all I could do to make her eat hers, she was so troubled. And nothing ailed him, I guess, but that he’d picked up something in the kitchen. What I wanted to say was, don’t you think it’s because I don’t value your present, if you should notice by and by that I seem to have given up my claims to 280Busteretto. That sort of alive present has a will of its own. The little thing took to her from the first more than he did to me. Shall I tell Estelle that you wished to be remembered?”
“Pray do.”
“She’ll be sorry to hear you’re sick. Don’t say that again, Gerald,” she silenced him, letting her anxiety at last plainly appear. “Don’t tell me you aren’t sick, for I know better. It’s been taking away my appetite to see you make believe to eat, and choke over it. Your cough is so tight it sounds as if it tore your lungs. Give me your hand. It’s as hot, dear boy, and as dry!... Wait, let me feel your pulse.”
He knew that his pulse was high, that his temples ached, that a disposition to shiver accompanied the volcanic heat of his blood.
He laughed at her light-headedly while with serious concentration she counted the beats in his wrist.
“I’m going to stop at Doctor Gage’s on my way home,” she said, letting go his hand, and not heeding what he said. “And I’m going to tell him to come and see you.”
“Please do not! If I need a doctor, there is my own, an Italian, the same for years.”
“An Italian? Do you think they’re as good?”
“Better for my own case.”