The doctor coughed a little; Miss Drake raised her long chin, and with raised eyebrows, looked down on her finger-tips which were drumming on the table, and my Cousin William glanced from one to the other, not quite understanding her drift.
“But,” she continued, “I’ve apprised them already, and I tell you of course; it is—you’ll remember the name—an intimation from Henbane.”
“Poison!” said William, under his breath, with a look of pale inquiry at Doctor Drake, who at the moment was swallowing his tea very fast, and was seized on a sudden with an explosion of coughing, sneezing, and strangling, which compelled him to jump to his feet, and stagger about the room with his face in his pocket-handkerchief and his back to the tea-table.
“When Dr. Henbane,” said my aunt with severity, “I mean a—Doctor Drake—has quite done coughing, I’ll go on.”
There was a little pause.
“Confound it,” thought William, who was half beside himself, “it’s a very odd dying scene!”
The doctor, blowing his nose, returned very red and solemn, and explained, still coughing at intervals, that it was a little tea in the trachea; it invariably occurred to him when he drank tea in the evening; he must give it up; “you know, Letty.”
Miss Drake did not deign to assist him.
“She does not seem to know so much about it as you do,” observed Aunt Dinah with an irony.
“Owing to my not thinking so much,” replied Miss Letty, sarcastically.