Part 19 (1/2)

Miss Isobel and Miss Enid, who had been a.s.suring each other almost hourly that they could not stand that awful boy in the house another day, looked at each other intercedingly.

”It would be a great help if you could stay at least until mother learns to use her crutches,” urged Miss Enid.

”Yes, and until we get some one we can trust to stay with us at night,”

added Miss Isobel.

”I'll stay as long as you like!” said Quin heartily; and he departed to make his peace with Madam.

CHAPTER 12

From that time on Quin's status in the family became less anomalous. To be sure, he was still Mr. Randolph's private secretary, Madam's top sergeant, Miss Isobel's and Miss Enid's body-guard, and the household's general-utility man; but he was now something else in addition. Miss Isobel had discovered, quite by chance, that he was the grandson of Dr.

Ezra Quinby, whose book ”Christianizing China” had been one of the inspirations of her girlhood.

”And to think we considered asking him to eat in the pantry!” she exclaimed in horror to her sister.

”Well, I told you all along he was a gentleman by instinct,” said Miss Enid.

To be sure, they were constantly shocked by his manners and his frank method of speech, but they were also exhilarated. He was like a disturbing but refres.h.i.+ng breeze that swept through their quiet, ordered lives. He talked about things and places they had never heard of or seen, and recounted his experiences with an enthusiasm that was contagious.

As for Quin, he found, to his surprise, that he was enjoying his new quarters quite as much as he had the old ones. Madam was a never-ending source of amus.e.m.e.nt and interest to him, and Miss Isobel and Miss Enid soon had each her individual appeal. He liked the swish of their silk petticoats, and the play of their slim white hands about the coffee-tray.

He liked their super-feminine delicacies of speech and motion, and the flattering interest they began to take in all his affairs.

Miss Isobel developed a palpitating concern for his spiritual welfare and invited him to go to church with her. She even introduced him to the minister with proud reference to his distinguished grandfather, and basked in the reflected glory.

Quin did not take kindly to church. He considered that he had done his full duty by it in the first fourteen years of his life, when he, along with the regenerate heathen, had been forced to attend five services every Sunday in the gloomy chapel in the compound at Nanking. But if Eleanor's aunt had asked him to accompany her to the gates of h.e.l.l instead of the portals of heaven, he would have acquiesced eagerly. So strenuously did he lift his voice in the familiar hymns of his youth that he was promptly urged to join the choir, an ordeal whose boredom was mitigated only during the few moments when the collection was taken up and he and the tenor could bet on which deacon would make his round first.

Not for years had Miss Isobel had such thrilling occupation as that of returning Ezra Quinby's grandson to the spiritual fold. In spite of the fact that Quin was a fairly decent chap already, whose worst vices were poker and profanity, she persisted in regarding him as a brand which she had been privileged to s.n.a.t.c.h from the burning.

What gave him a yet more intimate claim upon her was the fact that his heart and lungs were still troublesome, and with any over-exertion on his part, or a sudden change in the weather, his chest became very sore and his racking cough returned. At such times Miss Isobel was in her glory.

She would put him to bed with hot-water bottles and mustard plasters and feed him hot lemonade. Quin took kindly to the coddling. No one had fussed over him like that since his mother died, and he was touchingly grateful.

”Say, you'd be a wonder out at the hospital,” he said to her on one of these occasions. ”I wish some of those fellows with the flu could have you to look after them.”

Miss Isobel's long, sallow face with its dark-ringed eyes lit up for a moment.

”There is nothing I should like better,” she said. ”But of course it's out of the question.”

”Why?”

”Mother doesn't approve of us doing any work at the camp. She did make an exception in the case of my niece, but Eleanor was so insistent. Sister and I try never to oppose mother's wishes. It cuts us off from a great many things; but then, I contend that our first duty is to her.”

Miss Isobel's att.i.tude toward her mother was that of a monk to his haircloth s.h.i.+rt. She acquired so much merit in her friends' eyes and in her own by her patient endurance that the penance was robbed of half its sting.

”Things are awful bad out at the hospital now,” went on Quin. ”A fellow was telling me yesterday that in some of the wards they only have one nurse to two hundred patients. The epidemic is getting worse every day.

You-all in town here don't know what it's like where there's so many sick and so few to take care of 'em.”