“Kind people trained me for the stage; they were kind enough to say I had talent.  And now I have tried to do my best in the movies.  Mr. Hammond thinks I am a good pantomimist; but Grimes declares I have no ’film charm,’” and Miss Gray sighed again.  “He has another girl he wants to push forward, and is angry that Mr. Hammond did not send her to head this company.”

“Then this Mr. Hammond is quite an important man?” asked Ruth.

“Head of the Alectrion Film Corporation.  He is immensely wealthy and a really good man.  Of course,” went on Miss Gray, “he is in the business of making films for money; just the same, he makes a great many pictures purely for art’s sake, or for educational reasons.  You would like Mr. Hammond, I am sure,” and the girl in bed sighed again.

Ruth saw that talking troubled Miss Gray and kept her mind upon her quarrel with the moving picture director; so it did not need Aunt Alvirah’s warning to make the girl of the Red Mill steal away and leave the patient to such repose as she might get.

CHAPTER IV

A TIME OF CHANGE

Tom Cameron looked funny enough in some of the miller’s garments; but he was none the worse for his bath in the river.  He, too, had been dosed with hot tea by Aunt Alvirah, though he made a wry face over it.

“Never you mind, boy,” Ruth told him, laughing.  “It is better to have a bad taste in your mouth for a little while than a sore throat for a week.”

“Hear! hear the philosopher!” cried Tom.  “You’d think I was a tender little blossom.”

“You know, you might have the croup,” suggested Ruth, wickedly.

“Croup!  What am I—­a kid?” demanded Tom, half angry at this suggestion.  He had begun to notice that his sister and Ruth were inclined to set him down as a “small boy” nowadays.

“How is it,” Tom asked his father one day, “that Helen is all grown up of a sudden? I’m not!  Everybody treats me just as they always have; but even Colonel Post takes off his hat to our Helen on the street with overpowering politeness, and the other men speak to her as though she were as old as Mrs. Murchiston.  It gets me!”

Mr. Cameron laughed; but he sighed thereafter, too.  “Our little Helen is growing up, I expect.  She’s taken a long stride ahead of you, Tommy, while you’ve been asleep.”

“Huh!  I’m just as old as she is,” growled Tom.  “But I don’t feel grown up.”

And here was Ruth Fielding holding the same attitude toward him that his twin did!  Tom did not like it a bit.  He was a manly fellow and had always observed a protective air with Ruth and his sister.  And, all of a sudden, they had become young ladies while he was still a boy.

“I wish Nell would come back with my duds,” he grumbled.  “I have a good mind to walk home in these things of the miller’s.”