d stinging, and directed not to talk. While her
husband and daughter were hanging up things, and reducing the tumbled
room to order, the doctor arrived.

"Dr. Hollister, I call this an imposition!" protested the invalid
smilingly. "I have been doing a little too much, that's all! But don't
you dare say the word rest-cure to me again!"

But Doctor Hollister did not smile; there was no smiling in the house
that day.

"Mother may have to go away," Alexandra told anxious friends, very
sober, but composed. "Mother may have to take a rest-cure," she said a
day or two later.

"But you won't let them send me to a hospital again, Kane?" pleaded his
wife one evening. "I almost die of lonesomeness, wondering what you and
the children are doing! Couldn't I just lie here? Marthe and Sandy can
manage somehow, and I promise you I truly won't worry, just lie here
like a queen!"

"Well, perhaps we'll give you a trial," smiled Kane Salisbury, very
much enjoying an hour of quiet, at his wife's bedside. "But don't count
on Marthe. She's going."

"Marthe is?" Mrs. Salisbury only leaned a little more heavily on the
strong arm that held her, and laughed comfortably. "I refuse to concern
myself with such sordid matters," she said. "But why?"

"Because I've got a new girl, hon."

"You have!" She shifted about to stare at him, aroused by his tone.
Light came. "You've not gotten one of those college cooks, have you,
Kane?" she demanded. "Oh, Kane! Not at thirty-seven dollars a month!
Oh, you have, you wicked, extravagant boy!"

"Cheaper than a trained nurse, petty!"

Mrs. Salisbury was still shaking a scandalized head, but he could see
the pleasure and interest in her eyes. She sank back in her pillows,
but kept her thin fingers gripped tightly over his.

"How you do spoil me, Tip!" The name took him back across many years to
the little eighteen-dollar cottage and the days before Sandy came. He
looked at his wife's frail little figure, the ruffled frills that
showed under her loose wrapper, at throat and elbows. There was
something girlish still about her hanging dark braid, her big eyes half
visible in the summer twilight.

"Well, you may depend upon it, you're in for a good long course of
spoiling now, Miss Sally!" said he.

CHAPTER III

Justine Harrison, graduate servant of the American School of Domestic
Science, arrived the next day. If Mrs. Salisbury was half consciously
cherishing an expectation of some one as cr