'I'm afraid I don't. How very kind of you!' she murmured again.
Althea brought a glass of water and, selecting her little bottle, poured out the proper number of drops. 'You were feeling ill last night, weren't you?' she said, after the dose had been swallowed. 'I thought that you looked ill.'
'Last night?'
'Yes, don't you remember? I sat next you in the dining-room.'
'Oh yes; of course, of course! I remember now. You had this dress on; I noticed all the little silver tassels. Yes, I've been feeling wretched for several days; I've done hardly anything—no shopping, no sight-seeing, and I ought to be back in London to-morrow; but I suppose I'll have to stay in bed for a week; it's very tiresome.' She spoke wearily, yet in decisive little sentences, and her voice, its hardness and its liquid intonations, made Althea think of wet pebbles softly shaken together.
'You haven't sent for a doctor?' she inquired, while she took out her small clinical thermometer.
'No, indeed; I never send for doctors. Can't afford 'em,' said the young lady, with a wan grimace. 'Must I put that into my mouth?'
'Yes, please; I must take your temperature. I think, if you let me prescribe for you, I can see after you as well as a doctor,' Althea assured her. 'I'm used to taking care of people who are ill. The friend I've just been staying with in Venice had influenza very badly while I was with her.'
She rather hoped, after the thermometer was removed, that the young lady would ask her some question about Venice and her present destination; but, though so amiable and so grateful, she did not seem to feel any curiosity about the good Samaritan who thus succoured her.
Althea found her patient less feverish next morning when she went in early to see her, and though she said that her body felt as though it were being beaten with red-hot hammers, she smiled in saying it, and Althea then, administering her dose, asked her what her name might be.
It was Helen Buchanan, she learned.
'And mine is Althea Jakes. You are English, aren't you?'
'Oh no, I'm Scotch,' said Miss Buchanan.
'And I am American. Do you know any Americans?'
'Oh yes, quite a lot. One of them is a Mrs. Harrison, and lives in Chicago,' said Miss Buchanan, who seemed in a more communicative mood. 'I met her in Nice one winter; a very nice, kind woman, who gives most sumptuous parties. Her husband is a millionaire; one never sees him. Do you come from Chicago? Do you know her?'
Althea, with some emphasis, said that she came from Boston.
'Another,' Miss Buchanan pursued, 'lives in New York, though she is usually over here; she is immensely rich, too. She hunts every winter in England, and is great fun and is frightfully well up in everything—pictures, books, music, you know: Americans usually are well up, aren't they? She wants me to stay with her some day in New York; perhaps I shall, if I can manage to afford the voyage. Her name is Bigham; perhaps you know her.'
'No. I know of her, though; she is very well known,' said Althea rather coldly; for Mrs. Bigham was an excessively fashionable and reputedly reckless lady who had divorced one husband and married another, and whose doings filled more scrupulous circles with indignation and unwilling interest.
'Then I met a dear little woman in Oxford once,' said Miss Buchanan. 'She was studying there—she had come from a college in America. She was so nice and clever, and charming, too; quaint and full of flavour. She was going to teach in a college when she went back. She was very poor, quite different from the others. Her father, she told me, kept a shop, but didn't get on at all; and her brother, to whom she was devoted, sold harmoniums. It was just like an American novel. Wayman was her name—Miss Carrie Wayman; perhaps you know her. I forget the name of the town she came from, but it was somewhere in the western part of America.'
No, Althea said, she did not know Miss Wayman, and she felt some little severity for the confusion that Miss Buchanan's remarks indicated. With greater emphasis than before, she said that she did not know the West at all.
'It must be rather nice—plains and cowboys and Rocky Mountains,' Miss Buchanan said. 'I've a cousin on a ranch in Dakota, and I've often thought I'd like to go out there for a season; he says the riding is wonderful, and the scenery and flowers. Oh, my wretched head; it feels as if it were stuffed with incandescent cotton-wool.'
'You must remember to keep your arms under the covers,' said Althea, as Miss Buchanan lifted her hands and pressed them to her brows. 'And let me plait your hair for you; it must be so hot and uncomfortable.'
And now again, looking up at her while the friendly office was performed, Miss Buchanan said, 'How kind you are! too kind for words. I can't think what I should have done without you.'
CHAPTER IV.
It became easy after this for Althea to carry into effect all her beneficent wishes. The friends who had taken Miss Buchanan to the Riviera had gone on to London, leaving her alone in Paris for a week's shopping, and there was no one else to look after her. She brought her fruit and flowers and sat with her in all her spare moments. The feeling of anxiety that had oppressed her on the evening of gloom when she had first seen her was transformed into a soft and delightful perturbation. As the unknown lady in black Miss Buchanan had indeed charmed as well as oppressed her, and the charm grew while the oppression, though it still hovered, was felt more as a sense of alluring mystery. She had never in her life met any one in the least like Miss Buchanan. She was at once so open and so impenetrable. She replied to all questions with complete unreserve, but she had never, with all her candour, the air of making confidences. It hurt Althea a little, and yet was part of the allurement, to see that she was, probably, too indifferent to be reticent. Lying on her pillows, a cigarette—all too frequently, Althea considered—between her lips, and her hair wound in a heavy wreath upon her head, she would listen pleasantly, and as pleasantly reply; and Althea could not tell whether it was because she really found it pleasant to talk and be talked to, or whether, since she had nothing better to do, she merely showed good manners. Althea was sensitive to every shade in manners, and was sure that Miss Buchanan, however great her tact might be, did not find her a bore; yet she could not be at all sure that she found her interesting, and this disconcerted her. Sometimes the suspicion of it made her feel humble, and sometimes it made her feel a little angry, for she was not accustomed to being found uninteresting. She herself, however, was interested; and it was when she most frankly owned to this, laying both anger and humility aside, that she was happiest in the presence of her new acquaintance. She liked to talk to her, and she liked to make her talk. From these conversations she was soon able to build up a picture of Miss Buchanan's life. She came of an old Scotch family, and she had spent her childhood and girlhood in an old Scotch house. This house, Althea was sure, she really did enjoy talking about. She described it to Althea: the way the rooms lay, and the passages ran, and the queer old stairs climbed up and down. She described the ghost that she herself had seen once—her matter-of-fact acceptance of the ghost startled Althea—and the hills and moors that one looked out on from the windows. Led by Althea's absorbed inquiries, she drifted on to detailed reminiscence—the dogs she had cared for, the flowers she had grown, and the dear red lacquer mirror that she had broken. 'Papa did die that year,' she added, after mentioning the incident.
'Surely you don't connect the two things,' said Althea, who felt some remonstrance necessary. Miss Buchanan said no, she supposed not; it was silly to be superstitious; yet she didn't like breaking mirrors.
Her brother lived in the house now. He had married some one she didn't much care about, though she did not enlarge on this dislike. 'Nigel had to marry money,' was all she said. 'He couldn't have kept the place going if he hadn't. Jessie isn't at all a bad sort, and they get on very well and have three nice little boys; but I don't much take to her nor she to me, so that