Page:Hare and Tortoise (1925).pdf/31

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propriate to the heir of a statesman, a landlord, and a viscount.

4

Walter was at first embarrassed by having his chum's wife assume all the duties of a nurse, but gradually under her deft regime the two men, and later Mrs. Windrom, who had set out from Washington on receiving news of the accident, took Louise's ministrations as matter of course. Louise saved her pride by announcing that she was a born Martha, but privately resolved that, for the future, her Mary personality should not so easily be caught napping.

Except for strangers who at rare intervals had strayed thither on hunting trips, Mrs. Windrom was the first woman of Keble's world who had entered their house. After her first maternal anxiety had been allayed and she had been assured that Dr. Bruneau had not mis-set her son's bones, Mrs. Windrom made a point of being pleasant to the young woman who was filling the place she had always expected her own daughter to occupy. Unfortunately, Louise felt that Mrs. Windrom made a point of it. Being a woman of restricted imagination, Mrs. Windrom was at a loss for ways and means to be friendly with a girl who had scarcely heard of the routines and the people comprising her stock-in-trade. There was not much to say beyond "good mornings" and "my dears," and the very lack of an