She always entered a room bouncingly, generally with the added effect of being pushed in by some unseen hand from behind. She recoiled, momentarily, at the tableau upon the rug, and Jessie observed it with a sick, guilty qualm that made her snatch away her hand from Orrin's hold.
He was not discomfited.
"Here is a frozen wayfarer I picked up on the bridge, my dear madam, taking an unconstitutional," he said. "Mindful of your known charity and condescension, I took the liberty of bringing her in to be treated by you as her needs require. If I may advise you in a matter in which you are so much wiser than myself, I recommend that a cup of warm drink—gruel, panada, or posset—and a reasonable amount of admonition, tempered to suit the exhausted state of the patient, be administered without delay. As an additional precaution against rheumatism, pleurisy, or bronchitis, a glass of hot lemonade, with"—affecting to whisper—"a tablespoonful of Jamaica rum or old Bourbon, at bedtime, would be eminently judicious. My impertinence culminates in the petition that you vouchsafe to bestow upon my unworthy but chilly self a cup of the nectar in common use upon your table under the name of souchong."
Jessie slipped away to her chamber while her cousin was replying in suitable terms to this nonsense, and did not reappear until the tea-bell had rung twice.
She had been crying, Mrs. Baxter saw at once, and she was still very pale. It had been a violent fit of weeping that had exhausted her to languor of expression and movement. The doctor spoke cheerily to her as she seated herself beside him.
"Well, my little girl, how are your spirits, this freezing night? Do they follow the mercury, or rise as it descends?"
An unfortunate question, but it brought a faint glow to her face.
"I shall be more lively when I have had my supper," she said, averting her eyes. "I am cold and tired now."
The doctor bent his head and raised his hand to ask a blessing, and then bade his wife "pour out Jessie's tea, forthwith. She looks as if she needed it," he subjoined, uneasily, watching her with eyes that were very keen when he was awake to what was passing in the everyday and material world.
Jessie sipped the scalding liquid, swallowing each spoonful with a tremendous effort, when it trickled down the lump that obstructed larynx and epiglottis, wishing, the while, that the doctor would subside into one of his fits of learned abstraction and knot his handkerchief, instead of staring so solemnly at her; expecting, every second, to hear him demand—"What have you been crying about, my daughter?"