“What you are doing now?”

“Taking you to see Tussie.”

“Oh but I promise to be cheerful.  I’ll tell him how comfortable we are.  He’ll see I look well taken care of.”

“But for all that I’m afraid he may—­he may—­”

“Why, we’re going to be tremendously taken care of.  Even he will see that.  Only think—­I’ve engaged twenty-five cooks.”

“Twenty-five cooks?” echoed Lady Shuttleworth, staring in spite of her sorrows.  “But isn’t my kitchenmaid—?”

“Oh she left us almost at once.  She couldn’t stand my uncle.  He is rather difficult to stand at first.  You have to know him quite a long while before you can begin to like him.  And I don’t think kitchenmaids ever would begin.”

“But my dear, twenty-five cooks?”

And Priscilla explained how and why she had come by them; and though Lady Shuttleworth, remembering the order till now prevailing in the village and the lowness of the wages, could not help thinking that here was a girl more potent for mischief than any girl she had ever met, yet a feeble gleam of amusement did, as she listened, slant across the inky blackness of her soul.

Tussie was sitting up in bed with a great many pillows behind him, finding immense difficulty in breathing, when his mother, her bonnet off and every trace of having been out removed, came in and said Miss Neumann-Schultz was downstairs.

“Downstairs?  Here?  In this house?” gasped Tussie, his eyes round with wonder and joy.

“Yes.  She—­called.  Would you like her to come up and see you?”

“Oh mother!”

Lady Shuttleworth hurried out.  How could she bear this, she thought, stumbling a little as though she did not see very well.  She went downstairs with the sound of that Oh mother throbbing in her ears.

Tussie’s temperature, high already, went up by leaps during the few minutes of waiting.  He gave feverish directions to the nurse about a comfortable chair being put exactly in the right place, about his pillows being smoothed, his medicine bottles hidden, and was very anxious that the flannel garment he was made to wear when ill, a garment his mother called a nightingale—­not after the bird but the lady—­and that was the bluest flannel garment ever seen, should be arranged neatly over his narrow chest.

The nurse looked disapproving.  She did not like her patients to be happy.  Perhaps she was right.  It is always better, I believe, to be cautious and careful, to husband your strength, to be deadly prudent and deadly dull.  As you would poison, so should you avoid doing what the poet calls living too much in your large hours.  The truly prudent never have large hours; nor should you, if you want to be comfortable.  And you get your reward, I am told, in living longer; in having, that is, a few more of those years that cluster round the end, during which you are fed and carried and washed by persons who generally