"Miss Rolleston," whispered Jack, who had just brought up the cutter, "I think I'll send up the doctor from the barracks. Du Meresq did get a baddish cut on the head, and, if he doesn't stay in a day or two, it might turn to erysipelas in this climate."
"Pray do. Oh, Mr. Vavasour! just tell me honestly, is not that sometimes—fatal when it gets to the head?"
Cecil's eyes, dilated with terror, betrayed her to Jack, over whose honest face came an expression of sympathy and intelligence.
"Of course; but we will take care of that. That's why I am sending up the doctor, to prevent him exposing himself out of doors just yet."
Cecil did not find the drive back so agreeable as the previous one. Du Meresq, chafing at the confinement his fast swelling foot would probably entail, and provoked at coming to grief after Lilla's taunt was in remarkably bad humour.
Cecil saw the state of the case, and drove on fast, philosophically allowing him to grumble and growl without much concerning herself; but it was almost dark before they drew up at "The Maples."
In the meantime, Colonel Rolleston, having heard from Miss Prosody that his daughter and Du Meresq had gone off to a toboggining party, chose to be highly scandalized, and poured into the placid ear of his wife a torrent of disapprobation.
In vain did Mrs. Rolleston represent that they were out sleighing and skating together most days without his objecting.
"This was quite different—this was a public party—people would say they were engaged. He never had seen the good of their being so inseparable, but of course, his opinion on the subject had never been considered," etc.,—which last remark was rather uncalled for, as few heads of families have their womankind in better order than Colonel Rolleston.
A straw will show which way the wind blows. His wife listened with some uneasiness, for she had always hoped the Colonel tacitly approved the attachment between their respective relatives, which to her appeared so evident. She could only trust this was but a pettish effusion from their prolonged absence, and determined to guard against such causes of offence for the future.