Miriam took a piece.  “It is good enough,” she said, “but it is not a tart.  If Dora Bannister had made them, they would have been real tarts.”

“It is very well I said nothing about the dog,” thought Ralph; and then he said aloud, “It is not Dora Bannister that we have to consider; it is Molly Tooney.  She is to save you from the tears and perplexities of flour and yeast, and to make you the happy little lady of the house that you were before the wicked Phoebe went away.  But one thing I insist upon:  I want the rest of those tarts for my breakfast.”

Miriam looked at her brother with a smile that showed her storm was over.

“You are eating those things, dear Ralph,” she said, “because I made them, and that is the only good thing about them.”

CHAPTER XXI

THE DRANES AND THEIR QUARTERS

In a small room at the back of Dr. Tolbridge’s house there sat a young woman by the window, writing.  This was Cicely Drane; and although it was not yet ten days since Miss Panney broached her plan of the employment of Miss Drane as the doctor’s secretary, or rather copyist, here she was, hard at work, and she had been for two days.

The window opened upon the garden, and in the beds were a great many bright and interesting flowers, but paying no heed to these, Cicely gave her whole attention to her task, which, indeed, was not an easy one.  With knitted brows she bent over the manuscript of the “Diagnosis of Sympathy,” and having deciphered a line or two, she wrote the words in a fair hand on a broad sheet before her.  Then she returned to the study of the doctor’s caligraphy, and copied a little more of it, but the proportion of the time she gave to the deciphering of the original manuscript to that occupied in writing the words in her own hand was about as ten is to one.  An hour had elapsed since she had begun to write on the page, which she had not yet filled.

Miss Cicely Drane was a small person, nearing her twenty-second year.  She had handsome gray eyes, tastefully arranged brown hair, and a vivacious and pleasing face.  Her hands were small, her feet were small, and she did not look as if she weighed a hundred pounds, although, in fact, her weight was considerably more than that.  Her dress was a simple one, on which a great deal of thought had been employed to make it becoming.

For a longer time than usual she now bent over the doctor’s manuscript, endeavoring to resolve a portion of it into comprehensible words.  Then she held up the page to the light, replaced it on the table, stood up and looked at it, and finally sat down again, her elbows on the paper, and her tapering fingers in the little brown curls at the sides of her head.  Presently she raised her head, with a sigh.  “It is of no use,” she said.  “I must go and ask him what this means; that is, if he is at home.”

With the page in her hand, she went to the office door, and knocked.