He looked convincingly at Mrs. Maynard, who said she should like to try it.  “It’s just bronchial with me, you know.  But I should like to try it.  I know it would be soothing; and I’ve always heard that whiskey was the very thing to build you up.  But,” she added, lapsing from this vision of recovery, “I couldn’t take it unless Grace said so.  She’d be sure to find it out.”

“Why, look here,” said Barlow.  “As far forth as that goes, you could keep the bottle in my room.  Not but what I believe in going by your doctor’s directions, it don’t matter who your doctor is.  I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against Miss Breen, you understand?”

“Oh, no!” cried Mrs. Maynard.

“I never see much nicer ladies than her and her mother in the house.  But you just tell her about the whiskey with the white-pine chips in it.  Maybe she never heard of it.  Well, she hain’t had a great deal of experience yet.”

“No,” said Mrs. Maynard.  “And I think she’ll be glad to hear of it.  You may be sure I’ll tell her, Mr. Barlow.  Grace is everything for the balsamic properties of the air, down here.  That’s what she said; and as you say, it doesn’t matter how you get the balsam into your system, so you get it there.”

“No,” said the factotum, in a tone of misgiving, as if the repetition of the words presented the theory in a new light to him.

“What I think is, and what I’m always telling Grace,” pursued Mrs. Maynard, in that confidential spirit in which she helplessly spoke of her friends by their first names to every one, “that if I could once get my digestion all right, then the cough would stop of itself.  The doctor said—­Dr. Nixon, that is—­that it was more than half the digestion any way.  But just as soon as I eat anything—­or if I over-eat a little—­then that tickling in my throat begins, and then I commence coughing; and I’m back just where I was.  It’s the digestion.  I oughtn’t to have eaten that mince pie, yesterday.”

“No,” admitted Barlow.  Then he said, in indirect defence of the kitchen, “I think you had n’t ought to be out in the night air,—­well, not a great deal.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it does do me much good,” Mrs. Maynard said, turning her eyes seaward.

Barlow let his hand drop from the piazza post, and slouched in-doors; but he came out again as if pricked by conscience to return.

“After all, you know, it did n’t cure him.”

“What cure him?” asked Mrs. Maynard.

“The whiskey with the white-pine chips in it.”

“Cure who?”

“My brother.”

“Oh!  Oh, yes!  But mine’s only bronchial.  I think it might do me good.  I shall tell Grace about it.”

Barlow looked troubled, as if his success in the suggestion of this remedy were not finally a pleasure; but as Mrs. Maynard kept her eyes persistently turned from him, and was evidently tired, he had nothing for it but to go in-doors again.  He met Grace, and made way for her on the threshold to pass out.