“Sure, Mr. Brian, ye know ye’d do no such thing,” said the old woman throwing him a remonstrating glance. “Ye’d go yourself first.”
He laughed shortly, then exclaimed: “Oh, sew it on—sew it on and don’t talk. I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll have it on in two minutes.”
At this the old woman’s fingers flew, and in a short time the button was in place, the coat on Dr. Camperdown’s back, and with a hasty “I’ll not be back to dinner,” he had hurried out of the kitchen to the floor above, where he rapidly donned a cap and coat and went out into the street.
The air was keen and frosty and he drew great breaths of it into his capacious lungs.
“I could walk twenty miles,” he muttered as he swung himself along by lighted shops and houses.
As he went on the streets became more and more shabby. The gutters about him were dirty and many of the houses were mere wooden shells and a most insufficient protection against the winter winds.
Midway on the dirtiest and least respectable of the streets he stopped in front of a long, clean brick building erected by the charitable people of the town for the better housing of the poor. To the street it presented high walls pierced by windows of good size. Inside was a large yard overlooked by a double row of verandas that ran along the building. Passing through an archway he entered this yard, looked across it at the washhouses, storerooms, and a little eating house with gayly flaunting lights, then turning to his left stepped on a veranda and knocked lightly at a door.
“Come in,” said a voice like a bell, and softly turning the handle he entered a little plainly furnished room where a bright fire blazed merrily.
There was one elegant bit of furniture in the room, an elaborately carved davenport, where sat a tall, magnificently proportioned woman with a white, firm, smooth skin like a baby’s, a pair of deep blue eyes, and a crown of pale golden hair that lay in coils on the top of her head and waved down in little ringlets and circlets over her neck.
Ah, that neck—he would give worlds to touch it; and Brian Camperdown stood trembling like a boy as he looked at it. The woman had her back to him and was writing busily. Presently the pen stopped running over the paper and she thoughtfully leaned her head on a shapely white hand.