"'So,' he said, 'to speak plainly, you are in love with my cousin, and you plotted to keep the father in bed in order that you might make love to the daughter! That is the most remarkable recent application of medical science I have heard of!'
"'Oh no,' I cried, 'I assure you it was Truda who——!
"'Ah,' he said, quietly, 'it was Truda, was it? I can well believe that.'
"Then he thought a long while, and at last he said, 'Well, it will do the old man a great deal of good to stay in bed and not worry his own family and the whole neighbourhood with his whimsies. Moreover, milk diet is a very soothing thing. We will let it go at that. You can settle your own affairs with my cousin Gertrude, Dr. Peterson; I have nothing to do with that. Indeed, I would not meddle with that volcanic young person's private concerns for all the wealth of the Indies! Let us go back to my uncle.'
"So," concluded Peterson, knocking the ashes out of his pipe on the bars of the grate, "the old fellow has been in bed ever since and has drunk his own weight in good cow's milk several times over. He is putting on flesh every day, and his temper is distinctly improving. He can be trusted with a candlestick beside him on the stand now, without the certainty of his throwing it at his nurse."
"And Truda?" I suggested, "what did she say?"
"Well, of course I told her how her cousin had said that I had ordered the father to bed, in order that I might make love to the daughter. She and I were in the waterside glade beyond the pond at the time. You know the place. We were looking for dippers' nests. She stopped and said:
"'Jem Playfair said that, did he?'
"'Yes, these were his very words,' I said, with a due sense of their heinousness.
"'He said you sent my father to bed that you might make love to me?'