“Well, how silly of me!” Mrs. Salisbury said weakly.  She sighed, tried too quickly to sit up, and fainted quietly away again.

This time she opened her eyes in her own bed, and was made to drink something sharp and stinging, and directed not to talk.  While her husband and daughter were hanging up things, and reducing the tumbled room to order, the doctor arrived.

“Dr. Hollister, I call this an imposition!” protested the invalid smilingly.  “I have been doing a little too much, that’s all!  But don’t you dare say the word rest-cure to me again!”

But Doctor Hollister did not smile; there was no smiling in the house that day.

“Mother may have to go away,” Alexandra told anxious friends, very sober, but composed.  “Mother may have to take a rest-cure,” she said a day or two later.

“But you won’t let them send me to a hospital again, Kane?” pleaded his wife one evening.  “I almost die of lonesomeness, wondering what you and the children are doing!  Couldn’t I just lie here?  Marthe and Sandy can manage somehow, and I promise you I truly won’t worry, just lie here like a queen!”

“Well, perhaps we’ll give you a trial,” smiled Kane Salisbury, very much enjoying an hour of quiet, at his wife’s bedside.  “But don’t count on Marthe.  She’s going.”

“Marthe is?” Mrs. Salisbury only leaned a little more heavily on the strong arm that held her, and laughed comfortably.  “I refuse to concern myself with such sordid matters,” she said.  “But why?”

“Because I’ve got a new girl, hon.”

“You have!” She shifted about to stare at him, aroused by his tone. 
Light came.  “You’ve not gotten one of those college cooks, have you,
Kane?” she demanded.  “Oh, Kane!  Not at thirty-seven dollars a month! 
Oh, you have, you wicked, extravagant boy!”

“Cheaper than a trained nurse, petty!”

Mrs. Salisbury was still shaking a scandalized head, but he could see the pleasure and interest in her eyes.  She sank back in her pillows, but kept her thin fingers gripped tightly over his.

“How you do spoil me, Tip!” The name took him back across many years to the little eighteen-dollar cottage and the days before Sandy came.  He looked at his wife’s frail little figure, the ruffled frills that showed under her loose wrapper, at throat and elbows.  There was something girlish still about her hanging dark braid, her big eyes half visible in the summer twilight.

“Well, you may depend upon it, you’re in for a good long course of spoiling now, Miss Sally!” said he.

CHAPTER III