"What's the use?" asked Doctor Smalley, philosophically. "If they fuss
over her she'll suspect something."

As he went down the stairs he looked about him. The hall was fresh with
new paper and white paint, and in the yard at the rear, visible through
an open door, the border of annuals was putting out its first blossoms.

"Nice little place you've got here," he observed. "I think I see the
fine hand of Miss Edith, eh?"

"Yes," said Willy Cameron, gravely.

He had made renewed efforts to get a servant after that, but the invalid
herself balked him. When he found an applicant Mrs. Boyd would sit, very
much the grande dame, and question her, although she always ended by
sending her away.

"She looked like the sort that would be running out at nights," she
would say. Or: "She wouldn't take telling, and I know the way you like
your things, Willy. I could see by looking at her that she couldn't cook
at all."

She cherished the delusion that he was improving and gaining flesh under
her ministrations, and there was a sort of jealousy in her care for him.
She wanted to yield to no one the right to sit proudly behind one of her
heavy, tasteless pies, and say:

"Now I made this for you, Willy, because I know country boys like pies.
Just see if that crust isn't nice."

"You don't mean to say you made it!"

"I certainly did." And to please her he would clear his plate. He rather
ran to digestive tablets those days, and Edith, surprising him with one
at the kitchen sink one evening, accused him roundly of hypocrisy.

"I don't know why you stay anyhow," she said, staring into the yard
where Jinx was burying a bone in the heliotrope bed. "The food's awful.
I'm used to it, but you're not."

"You don't eat anything, Edith."

"I'm not hungry. Willy, I wish you'd go away. What right we got to tie
you up with us, anyhow? We're a poor lot. You're not comfortable and you
know it. D'you know where she is now?"

"She" in the vernacular of the house, was always Mrs. Boyd.

"She forgot to make your bed, and she's doing it now."

He ran up the stairs, and forcibly putting Mrs. Boyd in a chair, made up
his own bed, awkwardly and with an eye on her chest, which rose and fell
alarmingly. It was after that that he warned Edith.

"She's not strong," he said. "She needs care and--well, to be happy.
That's up to the three of us. For one thing, she must not have a shock.
I'm going to warn Dan against exploding paper bags; she goes whit