Emily laughed and patted Mrs. Barnes' plump shoulder.
“Health!” she repeated. “Why, I have never been as well since I can remember. I couldn't be sick here, in this wonderful place, if I tried. Do you think I look ill? . . . Oh, Mr. Daniels!” addressing the lawyer, who had just entered the dining-room, “I want your opinion, as a—a specialist. Auntie is afraid I am ill. Don't you think I look about as well as anyone could look?”
Heman bowed. “If my poor opinion is worth anything,” he observed, “I should say that to find fault with your appearance, Miss Howes, would be like venturing to—er—-paint the lily, as the saying is. I might say more, but—ahem—perhaps I had better not.”
Judging by the young lady's expression he had said quite enough already.
“Idiot!” she exclaimed, after he had left the room. “I ask him a sensible question and he thinks it necessary to answer with a silly compliment. Thought I was fishing for one, probably. Why will men be such fools—some men?”
Mr. Daniels' opinion concerning his professional rival was asked a good many times during that first fortnight. He treated the subject as he did the rival, with condescending toleration. It was quite plain that he considered his own position too secure to be shaken. In fact, his feeling toward John Kendrick seemed to be a sort of kindly pity.
“He appears to be a very well-meaning young man,” he said, in reply to one of the questions. “Rash, of course; very young men are likely to be rash—and perhaps more hopeful than some of us older and—ahem—wiser persons might be under the same circumstances. But he is well-meaning and persevering. I have no doubt he will manage to pick up a few crumbs, here and there. I may be able to throw a few in his way. There are always cases—ah—which I can't—or don't wish to—accept.”
When this remark was repeated to Captain Obed the latter sniffed.
“Humph!” he observed, “I don't know what they are. I never see a case Heman wouldn't accept, if there was as much as seventy-five cents in it. If bananas was a nickel a bunch the only part he'd throw in anybody else's way would be the skins.”
John, himself, did not seem to mind or care what Mr. Daniels or anyone else said. He wrote a letter to New York and, in the course of time, a second-hand desk, a few chairs, and half a dozen cases of law books arrived by freight and were installed in the ex-barber-shop. The local sign-painter perpetrated a sign with “John Kendrick, Attorney-at-law” upon it in gilt letters, and the “looking out of the window” really began.