"Of course you may! I should think you'd earned admittance." Miss Theodosia was sizzling gently with perfectly natural irritation. Now that her baby was safe, she had leisure to be irritated.
"Come and rest in the easiest chair you can find. When I think--"
"Don't think! Let's just have cups of tea and wait for the show to begin."
"Oh, no, you only think you are, dear lady. You are deceiving yourself. Crossness and--er--nerve-itis are two very different diseases (you note I term them both diseases). I speak as One Who Did Once Know."
Miss Theodosia, on her way for cups of tea, paused in her dim doorway.
"In ten years 'nerve-itis' has lost none of its pep--rather annexed more. It may have another name."
"Nerve-itus Dance," murmured the voice in the doorway. "That's it--that's what I was having when you came. I don't think I am quite over the attack yet."
"Three lumps of sugar dissolved in a cup of tea," prescribed the man-voice promptly. "Repeat the dose in five minutes. Never known to fail. As a preventive of--er--contagion, it is well for any also who have been exposed--"
"I'll have it there in a minute. The kettle's boiling," called Miss Theodosia from interior regions. She came back presently with a tray lit by a tiny flare of candle-light.
"'How far that little candle throws his beams-- So shines a good deed in a naughty world'"
quoted he. "The good deed is the good tea."
"And the naughty world is Evangeline. Won't you have three lumps just this time, to make perfectly sure you don't contract my Nerve-itus Dance?"
"Safety first," he laughed. "Four lumps. This is our first tea-party at 'Candle-lighting Time,' isn't it?"
Now Miss Theodosia laughed. It was easy to laugh with Elly Precious being bedded down instead of lost.
"How you do quote to-night!" she said. "That's the third time, counting 'Safety First,' in the last five minutes."
"Pardon," he craved. "It's because I feel happy. I'm likely to quote again at any minute."
"Well, quote the Scriptures then to Evangeline when she comes."
She was coming now. They could hear the light, hurrying steps. Was Evangeline never tired? Did neither parades nor circuses--mysterious wanderings nor mysterious triumphs--affect her?
"The show is about to begin," murmured Miss Theodosia.