"My dear doctor! My niece at a boarding-school? Never!"
"Why not? There are plenty of good schools where she would be happy and well cared for. Then she must go somewhere else. Send her to her mother's relatives in the South. They live in the country, don't they? Let her grow up with Valentine. The brother and sister had much better be together."
"It is out of the question, doctor. I do not want to give up my niece, and I cannot consent to her being brought up in that large family of boys and girls. She would grow very rough among them."
"The rougher the better, say I," said the doctor, rising to go, "and I tell you plainly, Miss Herrick, unless you do something of that sort there is no saving the child. Drugs won't keep her alive. She needs no medicine, but a natural, free child's life, and the sooner you send her to get it the better. She behaves precisely as if she had something on her mind. What is it?"
"I don't know, I am sure," cried Miss Herrick, who was deeply alarmed. "I can't imagine what it is, unless it is about her father. Miss Rice says she talks in her sleep about his not coming home to her."
"And he ought to come home to her," said the doctor, who had been a friend of Edward Herrick's when they were boys. "What right has a man to shirk his responsibilities in this way?"
"Poor Edward!" began Miss Herrick.
"Fudge and fiddlesticks for 'poor Edward'!" exclaimed the doctor, walking about the room. "You have much more reason to say 'poor Elizabeth.' But I had better take myself off before I say anything to be sorry for. Good-morning."
And the front door slammed before Miss Herrick had recovered from her astonishment at his last speech.
She repeated his opinion of Elizabeth to her sister, and then she wrote, though much against her will, to Mrs. Redmond. She could not understand why the life with her father's sisters should not be the best thing in the world for Elizabeth, but apparently it was not.