"You haven't some kind of drink for me, have you, Rhoda?" he says, sort of faint-like. "It's been a hard day at the hospital."
Now that might do for some, but not for me, that's known the doctor fifty-four years come Easter. I looked at the wheels of the gig, and they were all clay, red clay from the one road hereabouts that's made of it—the graveyard road. And I knew where he'd been. But of course I says nothing, but brings him a palm-leaf fan, and seats him out of the glare, in the entry that looks over the little garden, and I waters the red bricks of the porch with a spray or two from the garden-pot (nothing so cooling as watered brick, I say!) and hurries in to beat up his drink. He settled down in the old chair I always keep for him—a Windsor, cushioned in some English chintz his wife brought me out from home, twenty years ago—and I heard him sigh and stretch as I got the lemons and the eggs. I beat up the whites, stiff as silver, added the lemon juice by littles, dusted a bit of castor sugar, and stuck in a sprig of mint from my sunken half-barrel where the cress grows.
"Ah, that makes a man new!" says he, handing back the glass. "It's a pity you can't patent that, Rhoda!"
And then he pulled out his old pipe, and smoked for a quarter-hour, without a word. But he rested.
"And how's Miss Jessop, these days, doctor?" says I, when I saw he was ready for talking.
"Finely, finely!" says he. "Her little girl wrote me a letter yesterday. Ten years old! Image of her father, that child. You're as bad as Lisbet, though, that never would learn to change."
"I'm sure I beg her pardon—Mrs. Weldon, of course, and her with a boy fourteen, too!" says I. "How Miss Lisbet did take to her, surely! I always thought having her to help with Master Louis's children when they were so bad, just helped poor Miss Lisbet to bear with her sorrow at not starting the hospital, and all that."
"Yes, yes," he said and nodded.
"She was a fine woman, Jessop was. Best nurse I ever had. Yes, yes—Weldon's a lucky fellow."
The cress smelled strong in the heat, then, and I couldn't but say: