All through supper she discoursed of microbes and the dangerous minerals in spring water. She read us a lesson on cleanliness, repudiated the soda in the biscuits, and looked askance at the liberal amount of cream I took in my coffee.
“Cream has a deleterious effect on the liver,” she informed me, looking down her nose sourly, while Joey wrinkled his small face, appeared distressed at the turn the conversation was taking, and gasped forth:
“Why, Mr. David, do people have livers same as chickens?”
Mrs. Olds sniffed, Wanza looked out of the window and bit her lips, and I shook my head at Joey.
“My dear Mrs. Olds,” I said cheerfully, “there is nothing the matter with my liver, I assure you.”
She looked me over critically, inquired my age, and when I told her thirty-two, remarked darkly that I was young yet.
When Wanza and I were left alone in the kitchen, I had time to observe Wanza’s hair. It made me think of the flaxen curls on the heads of the French dolls I had seen displayed in the shop-windows at Christmas time. Each curl was crisp and glossy, and hung in orderly, beauteous exactness, and the little part in the centre of her head was even, and white as milk. Palely as her hair was wont to gleam, it shone still paler now, until in some lights it was almost of silvery fairness and indescribable sheen. Beneath it, her blue eyes looked almost black, her complexion had the rare whiteness of alabaster. There could be no two opinions on the subject—Wanza had washed her hair.
I knocked together a crude cot covered with a bit of canvas, on which Mrs. Olds and Wanza were to take turns sleeping in the kitchen, and I soldered an old canteen to be used as a hot-water bottle at the big man’s feet. And I did sundry small errands that Mrs. Olds required of me before I was dismissed for the night. But when Joey and I closed the kitchen door behind us and stole away in the darkness beneath the yews to our new sleeping quarters in the workshop, I went with an effulgent glow and rapture at my heart. She was beneath my roof. She was eating my bread. The room on which I had labored through many an arduous day out of love and compassion for Joey had become a haven of refuge for my wonder woman.
CHAPTER XI
THE KICKSHAW
THE doctor came early the next morning and he rendered me incredibly favorable reports of both his patients; so that I was able to buoy myself up with the hope of seeing Haidee before many days had passed. She sent me a series of charming messages by Wanza throughout the day. The first message was to the effect that the room was delicious and the bed like down. Again—the air through the open windows and door was sweet as the breath of asphodel. And the last message said that the outlook through the windows was so sylvan that almost she expected to hear the pipes of Pan, or see a faun perched upon the rocks, or a Psyche at the pool.