Part 17 (2/2)

”I'm mending. By-the-day, you know. Your nurse went walking. And your cook went to see her cousin. So if you really were hungry--isn't it lucky you aren't?--I don't know what we would do.” She advanced to the bedside. He made her want to shudder, he was so ugly in his long green dressing gown. With his bald head and piercing eyebrows he made her think of a gigantic worm. When he spoke his head waggled just as a worm's head waggles when it tops a rose bush.

”There was chicken--” he remembered petulantly, ”I like that cold--”

”It was vairee good--” Felicia a.s.sured him. Just to hear Felicia say ”Vairee” mouthing it as Mademoiselle D'Ormy had done, was refres.h.i.+ngly different. ”Bab.i.+.c.he had the skin and the bones and I had the rest. We stole it, you know--”

Her confession was deliciously funny, her eyes danced laughter though her tone was demurely proper. She was really thinking of Maman lying so lovely in her bed and she was thinking how Maman had talked about amusing people when they were worried and she was thinking that this dreadful old man was the most worried looking person she had ever seen.

His grizzled hand jammed another pillow feebly behind his shoulders.

He glared at her.

”Well, well, Miss--Whadda-you-call-it,” he was growing more peevish.

”You'll have to find something for me--”

Her smooth hand stretched toward him as quickly as a prestidigitator's, with the gla.s.s of orange juice. He was too surprised to do anything save drink it, gulping it throatily and handing back the gla.s.s with a grunt.

”And of course,” added Felicia with perfect good humor, ”I shall have to pay a forfeit--I always did when I took anything from Maman's tray.

If I was caught.”

Her childishness of manner did not seem at all incongruous to him. She was comfortably ageless so far as he was concerned, a drab figure with a pleasant voice who treated him as though he were a human being instead of a sick ogre. In some mysterious way her att.i.tude suggested something that no one had suggested to him for years--the thing called play!

”Forfeits for Maman,” she continued, ”meant I had to play chess--you don't play chess do you?”

He sat bolt upright. His beady eyes gleamed with excitement.

”Miss Whadda-you-call-it,” he retorted, ”you go right over there by my desk--open the bottom drawer--there's chessmen and a board. I've been looking for four years for somebody who had sense enough to play chess.”

Bab.i.+.c.he trotted at her heels, sniffing at all the new odors about her.

Felicia moved easily, she got the chess men, went and brought back her lap-board and sat patiently at the bedside.

Four o'clock, half past four o'clock, five o'clock--there was no sound save the shove of the chess men. The room grew dark--the old man impatiently indicated the light. The little dog curled contently on the foot of the bed, Felicia's sleek head bent over the board. He was no easy opponent. At quarter past five nurse fluttered heavily in, looked at the bedside and gasped.

”Why Mr. Alden--”

He waved her away.

At half past five, the mistress of the household puffed up the stairway. She paused by the deserted chair in the hallway.

”Where's the seamstress?” she demanded.

The nurse showed her.

Felicia's hand was poised over a knight, she looked up gravely and smiled.

Mrs. Alden's hat with its waving plumes was overpowering enough, but her voice, strident and angry, seemed to fill the whole room.

”Well, really,” she began, ”I think that's the most impudent thing that I have ever had any one do in my house! What do you think I hired you for?”

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