"Let us both get it," Mary cried gaily, "we'll be twice as quick."
And before Miss Gallup could protest they had gone to the kitchen and she could hear them laughing.
Mary was thoroughly enjoying herself. For three weeks she had poured out tea for her father solemnly at five o'clock and been snubbed for her pains.
Here were two people who liked her, who were glad to see her, who thought it kind of her to come. No girl can be wholly unconscious of admiration; nor, when it is absolutely reverential, can she resent it, and Mary felt no displeasure in Eloquent's.
They could neither of them cut bread and butter. It was a plateful of queerly shaped bits that went in on the tray; but there was an egg for Miss Gallup, and the tea was excellent.
Miss Gallup began to feel more leniently disposed towards Em'ly-Alice. "She's done for me pretty well on the whole," she told Mary. "Doctor, he wanted me to have the parish nurse over to Marle Abbas, but I don't hold with those new-fangled young women."
"She's a dear," said Mary; "mother thinks all the world of her."
"May be, may be," Miss Gallup said dryly; "but when you come to my time of life you've your own opinion about draughts. And as for that constant bathin' and washin', I don't hold with it at all. A bed's a bed, I says, and not a bath, and if you're in bed you should stay there and keep warm, and not have all the clothes took off you to have your legs washed. How can your legs get dirty if you're tucked in with clean sheets, in a clean room, in a clean house. When I haves a bath I like it comfortable, once a week, at night in front of the kitchen fire, and Em'ly-Alice safe in bed. No, my dear, I don't hold with these new-fangled notions, and Nurse Jones, she worries me to death. I 'ad 'er once, and I said, never again—whiskin' in and whiskin' out, and opening windows and washin' me all over, like I 'was a baby—most uncomfortable I call it."
The clock on the mantelpiece struck five, Mary jumped up. "I must fly," she exclaimed, "it's time for father's tea; I've been enjoying myself so much I forgot all about the time."
"You see Miss Mary as far as the gates," Miss Gallup said to her nephew. "Em'ly-Alice is in, I 'eard 'er pokin' the fire the wasteful way she has."