“Not very; but I feel out of sorts. My throat is rather painful.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Not much, I dare say. A little ulcerated perhaps.”
“I’ll have a look at it presently. Bessy, give Dr. Knox a cup of tea.”
“Thank you, I shall be glad of it,” interposed the doctor. It was not often he took a meal in the house, not liking to intrude on them. When he went up this evening he had thought tea was over.
“We are later than usual,” said Miss Tamlyn, in answer to some remark he made. “Bertie dropped asleep.”
Bertie was awake, and eating relays of bread-and-butter as he lay, speaking to no one. The handsome sitting-rooms downstairs were nearly deserted: Mr. Tamlyn could not bear even to take his meals away from Bertie.
It was growing dusk when Dr. Knox went home. Mr. Tamlyn told him to take a cooling draught and to go to bed early. Mrs. Knox was out for the evening. Janet Carey sat at the old piano in the schoolroom, singing songs to the children to keep them quiet. They were crowding round her, and no one saw him enter the room.
Janet happened to be singing the very song she sang later to us that night at Miss Deveen’s—“Blow, blow, thou wintry wind.” Although she had now been at Rose Villa nearly a twelvemonth, for early summer had come round again, Dr. Knox had never heard her sing. Mrs. Knox hated singing altogether, and especially despised Janet’s: it was only when Janet was alone with the children that she ventured on it, hoping to keep them still. Arnold Knox sat in utter silence; entranced; just as we were at Miss Deveen’s.
“You sing ‘I’ve been roaming,’ now,” called out Dicky, before the song was well over.