CHAPTER XIV
Mrs. Leavitt had not noticed the physician go. She had not been listening for some time, the turn of her pattern had been at its most difficult point. But she had managed it, and now sat counting contentedly. Helen was gazing into the fire, her face all tender and tense. Bransby had watched the door close, a queer purse on his lips. Presently he said grimly—half in jest, half in earnest—
“Well, he’s a queer kind of a doctor. I shall have to consult some one else.”
Mrs. Leavitt rose with a startled cry. Glancing up from the endless pattern, at an easy stage now, the dust-searching eye had discovered much small prey. She gathered up her work carefully and bustled about the room.
“If that dreadful Barker didn’t forget to straighten out this room while we were at dinner. Dr. Latham and Mrs. Hilary will think I am the most careless housekeeper. I do hope, Helen, that you explain to our friends how the war has taken all our servants. You should tell everybody that before it began Barker was only a tweeny, and now she is all we have in the shape of a butler and parlor-maid and three-quarters of our staff. And she is so careless and clumsy.” She went from cushion to vase, from fireplace to table, straightening out the room somewhat to her satisfaction: the father and the daughter watching her with resigned amusement.
A book lay open, face down on the writing-table. She pounced on the volume. Bransby’s amusement vanished. “Careful there, Caroline, I am reading that book.”
“Not now, you’re not—and books belong in book-cases.” She closed it with a snap.
“Now you’ve lost my place!”
“Well, the book’s in its proper place,” she said, thrusting it into its shelf. “There, that’s better. Now I wonder how the drawing-room is. I must see. Dear me, this war has been a great inconvenience,” she sighed as she went from the room—taking Hugh, none too willing, with her.
Caroline Leavitt was not an unpatriotic woman. Simply, to her home and house were country and universe too—her horizon enclosed nothing beyond them. She loved England, because her home and her housekeeping, this house and her vocation, were in it; and not her home, as some do, because it was in England. England was a frame, a background. Her emotions began at Deep Dale’s front door, and ended in its kitchen garden. There are many such women in the world.