'How are you, Kit?' asked Babs, after a little further reflection.

'I'm all right, thanks,' answered Christopher, faithfully, and he whistled a tune to fill the next pause. 'Awfully poor lying here, isn't it?' he resumed presently.

Barbara nodded. 'It's stale,' she said expressively.

Kit looked sympathetic. 'It would make _me_ sick,' he observed.

'Oh, it's all right,' Barbara hastened to a.s.sure him; and he whistled a little more.

'Jill's all right too, isn't she?' he continued after a while.

'Oh, Jill's all right--_rather_,' said the child, warmly. 'How are the other boys, Kit?'

'They're all right,' answered Kit.

'And Auntie Anna?'

'She's _all_ right,' answered Kit.

Conversation again languished slightly. Barbara's eyes, wandering round the room in search of inspiration, fell on the little bag of sweets that the Doctor had brought her.

'Have a sweet,' she suggested, pointing to the table by the window.

Christopher slipped off the bed with alacrity. 'It's awfully decent of you,' he observed. 'Sure you don't want them all?'

'Oh, no; take the whole jolly lot,' begged his sister.

Kit's countenance fell slightly when he peered into the bag. 'Acid drops,'

he commented briefly, and put a couple critically into his mouth. 'Who brought them?'

'Dr. Hurst. He said they were wholesome,' replied Babs, by way of explanation. She did not want Kit to think she had been such a m.u.f.f as to choose acid drops in preference to chocolate.

'That's just about what he would say,' remarked the boy, putting several more of them into his mouth.

'I--I think he's all right, Kit,' said Barbara, timidly.

Christopher shook his head vigorously. It was the only form of reply possible to him at the moment.

'He's a rotter,' he said, as soon as he could speak; 'and so slack, too!'

He peered again into the paper bag. 'Is it worth while?' he murmured to himself, and decided that it was not. 'Pity it wasn't some one else who got them for you,' he added with a sigh, as he returned to the bed.

'He isn't bad, _really_, Kit,' persisted the child, looking troubled.

'Not bad? Why, he's an awful old soft, Babe,' answered Kit, contemptuously. 'If you were a boy, you'd know.'

'He isn't old, anyhow. He's only twenty-eight; I asked him,' said Babs, eagerly.

'Oh, rats!' laughed Kit, who had quite got over his awkwardness by this time, and was rapidly forgetting that she was an invalid and that he had been told not to tease her. 'He may be twenty-eight perhaps, if you just count his birthdays, but he's as old as the hills for all that. He was born grown-up; that sort of chap always is.'

'He's been awfully kind to me, Kit,' persisted the child, her troubled look returning.

'You always think people are nicer than they are, don't you?' observed her brother, with gentle scorn. 'When we had that beast of a housekeeper who used to smack you and Robin, you always said her Sunday bonnet was beautiful, or something like that.'

'Oh, Kit!' was all Barbara felt capable of replying, and the boy rattled on heedlessly.

'That Doctor is the rottenest of rotters,' he declared in a cheerful tone.

'He only pretends to like you because you're what he calls a "case." If you'd got asthma, now, he'd treat you as if you were putting it all on, and make you feel a jolly humbug. _I_ know him!'

'Of course, you're always right, Kit,' said Babs, growing more unhappy every minute, 'but--but----'

'He treated us all like kids the first day you were ill,' said Christopher, scowling at the recollection; 'and once, when Jill was blubbing because you weren't so well, we got in a funk and went off on our own, Peter and I, to fetch him; and he wouldn't come. He said no one could do anything for you by just coming and looking at you, and we weren't to disturb him for nothing at all--or some such rot. Then we found that he'd cooked up an arrangement with Finny not to come unless _she_ sent for him. Just like him!'

Barbara was struggling feebly to keep back her tears. She could not think what was making her want to cry so much.

The boy had stopped scowling, and was chuckling softly to himself. Barbara held her breath, and thought that if he would only talk about something else, she might be able to keep from crying. Perhaps the table by the window might stop swimming about, too.

'We've scored one against him at last, though,' her brother was saying, in a voice that seemed suddenly to have gone a long way off. 'He must be quite at the other end of the gallery,' Babs thought. Yet some one was certainly sitting on the edge of her bed, because she could feel the mattress jumping up and down.

'We struck that little kid in the yard just now--the one who nearly gave you scarlet fever,' Christopher went on gaily. 'He came to know how you were, or something. Bobby Hearne, I think he called himself. Well, we got him to go to the doctor's house with a message from his aunt, who lives five miles t'other side of Crofts, to say that she had just fallen downstairs and nearly killed herself, and would he go to her at once!

Thirty miles there and back, all for nothing! Rather a score, eh? It was my idea, too, not Peter's!'

He turned to Barbara for approval, and found her sobbing bitterly. She had heard every word he said, with horrible distinctness, though his voice had come from such a long way off. She had tried to stop him, but she could not make a sound till she began to cry.

'Babe! I say, don't! What's up, old girl?' exclaimed Kit, staring at her in consternation. At any time it was an event, to make the Babe cry, but now that she was so ill, he felt nothing short of a brute.

Jill had slipped into the room and was bending over the excited child.

'Kit doesn't understand--he doesn't know he's not really a beast--he isn't a beast, is he?' gasped Barbara, between her sobs. 'He's played a horrible trick on him--he's sent him seven times round the world; and I never meant him really to walk seven times round the world--you know I didn't, Jill. It's all my fault for turning him out of my kingdom--if I hadn't turned him out of my kingdom, he wouldn't be wandering seven times round----'

'Hush!' whispered Jill, and she gave Christopher a look that sent him stumbling out of the room in a mixture of bewilderment and remorse. Up and down the landing he paced, feeling desperately wicked and desperately foolish by turns, until Jill opened the door of the bedroom and beckoned to him. She held a thermometer in her hand, and she paid no attention whatever to the shamefaced inquiry he stammered out.

'Send Miss Finlayson here at once, and say I want the Doctor,' she commanded, and went hurriedly back into the room.

Clearly, she was very angry with him, and it had never seemed possible before that Jill could be angry with any one. But it was not this that suddenly made Kit turn cold and funny all over as he started along the gallery with Jill's message. He pulled up short with a jerk, and gave a little cry of dismay.

'What shall I do?' he exclaimed in a despairing tone. 'I've sent the Doctor fifteen miles in the opposite direction.'

It was nearing seven o'clock and growing dusk when Kit at last struck the high road between four and five miles below Crofts. It was a full ten-mile drive by the road from Wootton Beeches, but Kit had saved over two miles by taking the short cut across the fields. He stopped for the first time since he had started on his mad chase after the Doctor, and looked panting up and down the deserted road.

'I can't have been much more than three-quarters of an hour, and I bet it's four miles,' he muttered. The mud with which he was splashed up to the collar showed the kind of ground over which he had been travelling, and the way his breath was coming and going told how much of the four miles had been covered at a run. Now that he had exhausted his first impulse to rush after the Doctor and bring him back at any cost, he began to realise what an absurd thing he had set himself to do. Dr. Hurst had had an hour's start of him at least, and even the short cut across the fields would not make up for that. With a quick-trotting cob like his, he would have reached his destination easily by this time and discovered the trick that had been played upon him, and no effort on Kit's part would bring him back a moment sooner than he would be coming of his own accord.

Besides, if it was any good going after him, Finny would have sent her man on horseback long before this, and he would have outdistanced Kit in any case.

'If only our bicycles had been there instead of at Crofts, I might have caught him up then,' cried the boy, as the hopelessness of the position dawned upon him.

Nothing answered him, and the road looked more dreary than ever. A good deal of rain had fallen that week, and the drip drip of the trees overhead added a kind of melancholy to everything. Christopher's quick imagination called up all the details of the scene he had left behind him: the unwonted anger of his cousin, the anxiety of Finny and Auntie Anna when he had rushed into the drawing-room with her message, and then their eagerness to ring the bell and send some one for the Doctor, whom he knew to be far away on a wild-goose chase of his own making. He pictured with vividness too the consternation that would be caused in the house when Finny's messenger returned from his fruitless errand, and the look that would come on Auntie Anna's face when Peter came in from his tramp with the other boys and explained the trick that had been played on the Doctor. No wonder he had hurried straight out of the house and struck blindly across the fields, without stopping to reflect whether it would be any good or not! Even now, though he knew how little he could do, he felt unable to remain inactive; and turning his face in the direction of Crofts, he once more broke into a run and hurried wildly along the muddy, desolate road.

He had been running about thirty-five minutes, only falling into a walk now and then to recover his breath, when the sound of wheels, coming from behind made him draw to the side of the road. He still trudged on, however, with his head down and his hands clenched, and he did not even trouble to look round when the vehicle caught him up and pa.s.sed him. The light from the lamp flashed across his face as it rolled swiftly by; and immediately afterwards, the trap pulled up just ahead of him.