"She is a shrewd creature," I answered. "It is absurd enough to compare anybody so decorous to a kitten."
"Aunt Naomi's nobody's fool," was his response. "She sent me here to-night."
"I don't know how this thing will strike you, Miss Ruth," he said explosively. "It seems to me all wrong. The fact is," he added more calmly, but with the air of meaning to have a disagreeable thing over, "it's about the Brownrig girl. You know about her, and that she is very sick."
He stretched out his large hand toward the fire in a way that showed he was not at ease. I could not help noticing the difference between the hand of this Deacon Daniel and that of the other. Deacon Webbe is a farmer, and has a farmer's hand. Deacon Richards has the white hand of a miller.
"I don't see myself," he said grimly, looking into the coals, "that there is likely to be anything contagious in her wickedness, but none of the women are willing to go near her. I should think she'd serve pretty well as a warning. The Overseers of the Poor 've sent old Marm Bagley to nurse her, and that seems to be their part; but who's to look out that Marm Bagley doesn't keep drunk all the time's more than I can see."
He sniffed scornfully, as if his opinion of women was far from flattering.
"Job Pearson--he's one of the Overseers--came to see if there wasn't somebody the church could send down. I went to Aunt Naomi, but she couldn't think of anybody. She's housed with a cold, and she wouldn't be the one to go into a sick-room anyway."
He turned to me with the smile which I can never resist.
"The truth is," he answered, "that when there's nothing else to do we all come to you, Miss Ruth."
"Did you expect me to go down and nurse the girl?"
He looked at me with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, and for a moment said nothing.
"I just expected if there was anything possible to be done you'd think of it," he replied.
I thought for a moment, and then I told him I would write to Cousin Mehitable to send down a trained nurse from Boston.
"The Overseers won't pay her," he commented with a grin.
"Perhaps you will," I returned, knowing perfectly that he was trying to tease.
"It will take several days at least to get her here."
We considered for a little in silence. I do not know what passed through his mind, but I thought with a positive sickening of soul of being under the same roof with that girl. I knew that it must be done, though; and, simply to be rid of the dread of it, I said as steadily as I could,--