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“Has she been talking to you about my John?” said the doctor, amused; and Kate gave a little nod of her pretty head at him, where she lay back like a rosebud upon the pillows. It was too late to answer in words, for Mrs Mitford was coming back from the door, followed by Mr Crediton, who looked excited and anxious, and had something like a tear in the corner of his eyes.
“Well, my pet, so you are better!” he said. “That is right, Kate. I have had a most miserable night, doctor, thinking of her. But now I hear it’s going to be all right. It is not, of course, for any special virtue in her,” he said, turning round to them with a strained little laugh when he had kissed her, “but one has all sorts of prejudices about one’s only child.”
“Yes, indeed. I know very well what it is to have an only child,” said Mrs Mitford. “You could not find more sympathy anywhere in that particular. When there is anything the matter with my boy, the whole world is turned upside down.”
Kate looked at th{20}e doctor with an inquiring glance, and he gave her a little confidential nod. The eyes of the young girl and the old man laughed and communicated while the two foolish parents were making their mutual confessions. “Is that my John she is speaking of?” asked Kate’s eyes; and the doctor replied merrily, delighted with his observing patient. To be sure there had been a grave enough moment on the previous day, when these two lives first crossed each other; but this was how the idea of him was formally introduced to Kate Crediton’s mind. It was a foolish, flighty, light, little mind, thinking of nothing but fun and nonsense. Yet even now it did cross the doctor’s mind, with a momentary compunction, that the business might turn out serious enough for poor John.
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CHAPTER II.
It was nearly a week before Kate was permitted to leave her bed, and during that time she had learned a great deal about the economy of Fanshawe Regis. She lay among the pillows every day a little higher, with her natural colour coming back, looking more and more like the Greuze, and listened to all the domestic revelations that flowed from Mrs Mitford’s lips. The kind woman was pleased with so lively a listener, and thus there gradually unrolled itself before Kate a moving panorama of another existence, which the girl, perhaps, had not sufficient imagination or sympathy to enter
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