Then surveying critically the young girl whose face was buried in the volume, “Body here, Judy—mind already back to time of Louis Quinze. Don’t read so steadily, you small bookworm. Remember your eyes. Better, aren’t they?”
“No; worse,” said the girl impatiently.
“Go and help your mother, won’t you? She needs you.”
“She can get on without me,” sullenly. “I have to do without her,” and pulling her hand from him, she made as though she would go upstairs. Suddenly she stopped, and eyed him curiously. She was struck by the intentness of his glance. “What are you thinking of?” she asked.
“Of a poor child—younger than you, called Zeb. When you’re disagreeable you look like her.”
She smiled disdainfully, and began to limp upstairs. “Judy,” he called after her, “where’s the colonel? He likes this sort of thing,” with a gesture in the direction of the drawing room.
“He’s not well,” said Judy with a meaning smile. “Mamma sent for him, but he’s dining early in the seclusion of the cottage. Good-bye, and thank you for the book,” and she took herself upstairs with such haste that he could not have recalled her had he wished to do so.
“Poor girl,” he muttered; “books her only comfort. Glad Flora isn’t my mother,” and with this sage reflection, he rammed his fur cap over his ears, turned up his coat collar, and opening a door at the back of the hall, crossed a veranda, went down a flight of steps, and struck into a path cut through the drifted snow, and leading down to the cottage.
It was very quiet under the pines. There was only a faint breath of wind, ruffling occasionally a few flakes of snow from the feathery armfuls held out by the flat, extended branches of the evergreens. Everything was pure and spotless. The white path that he followed was almost untrodden. The stars blinked down through fleecy clouds on an earth that for once was clean and without stain.
The lights from the cottage streamed out through the windows and lay in colored bands on the banks of snow. Dr. Camperdown paused an instant in the shadows of the trees as some one approached one of the windows and propped open a variegated square of glass.