“I was looking at a chilblain on my finger.”
“What admirable bathos, Parker! I might have taken you for Hamlet soliloquizing for the last time over Ophelia’s tokens.”
“Oh, quite possibly,” and he began to sip his tea; “you have forgotten the sugar. What execrable memories you women have!”
CHAPTER XXIV
“Daddy, my head, my head!”
“Lie quiet, little one. Hold her hands, Kate. Drink it all down, Gwen.”
“I can’t! Daddy, my head, oh, my head!”
Dr. John Tugler, standing before the nursery window, bit one corner of his mustache, and stared hard at the chimney of the steam-mill trailing a plume of smoke across the dull gray of the sky. The monotonous cooing of a dove came from a wooden cage hung in the back yard of the next-door house. A hundred yards away an iron railway bridge crossed the canal, and the thunder of each passing train made peace impossible in the little villa.
Dr. Tugler pulled down the blind.
“Beast of a back room,” he thought; “they must wring the neck of that confounded bird.”