Pinckney crossing the room, seizing Miss
Featherstone's hand and kissing her with effusion: "My dear Miss
Featherstone--your name is Featherstone, is it not?--I have no words to
thank you sufficiently."
"Oh, the chere mees!" burst forth the little Frenchman. "I was so full
of frighten I not know what to do, which way to turn myself; and she,
so calm, so _smooth_," he said, hesitating for a word, and apparently
discomfited when he found it--"she take the helm, she issue the orders:
every one obey, and the child is saved." After this peroration he
glanced around as if for applause.
"I was about to say," resumed Doctor Harris, "that, now that the nurse
has returned, Miss Featherstone, who has been travelling all day, had
better have some dinner and be sent to bed."
"Oh, certainly," replied Mrs. Pinckney; "and now that I'm so much
relieved I'd like some dinner myself.--Mr, Brown, do you know what
prospects there are of our having any dinner?"
The tutor shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands with a
deprecatory gesture: "I know not, my dear madame. Les enfants et moi,
we have our dinner at two o'clock: we did not comprehend that madame
would return to-night," as a happy apologetic afterthought.
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