“I could live with anybody, any nice person, and, of course, since I have been so well everything is even easier. I do hope I shall like her....”
She did like her, very much, Margaret saw to that, behaving exquisitely under the stimulus of Gabriel’s worshipping eyes; listening as if she were absorbedly interested in a description of the particular Healer who had Anne’s case in hand.
“At first you see I was quite strange to it, I didn’t understand completely. Mr. Roope is a little deaf, but he says he hears as much as he wants to ... so beautifully content and devout.”
“Has Mrs. Roope any defect?” Margaret got a word or two in edgeways before the end of the evening, her sense of humour helping her.
“She has a sort of hysterical affection. She goes ‘Bupp, bupp,’ like a turkey-cock and swells at the throat. At least that is what I thought, but I am very backward at present. Some one asked her the cause once, when I was there, and she said she had no such habit, the mistake was ours. It is all very bewildering.”
“Are there any other members of the family?”
“Her dear mother! Such a nice creature, and quite a believer; she has gall-stones.”
“Gall-stones!”
“Not really, you know, they pass with prayer. She looks ill, very ill sometimes, but of course that is another of my mistakes. I am having absent treatment now.”
“They know where you are?” Gabriel asked, perhaps a little anxiously.