It speaks well for Emma McChesney's balance that when she found herself in bed, two strange women, and one strange man, and an all- too-familiar bell-boy in the room, she did not say, "Where am I? What happened?" Instead she told herself that the amazingly and unbelievably handsome young man bending over her with a stethoscope was a doctor; that the plump, bleached blonde in the white shirtwaist was the hotel housekeeper; that the lank ditto was a waitress; and that the expression on the face of each was that of apprehension, tinged with a pleasurable excitement. So she sat up, dislodging the stethoscope, and ignoring the purpose of the thermometer which had reposed under her tongue.

"Look here!" she said, addressing the doctor in a high, queer voice.

"I can't be sick, young man. Haven't time. Not just now. Put it off until August and I'll be as sick as you like. Why, man, this is the middle of June, and I'm due in Minneapolis now."

"Lie down, please," said the handsome young doctor, "and don't dare remove this thermometer again until I tell you to. This can't be put off until August. You're sick right now."

Mrs. McChesney shut her lips over the little gla.s.s tube, and watched the young doctor's impa.s.sive face (it takes them no time to learn that trick) and, woman-wise, jumped to her own conclusion.

"How sick?" she demanded, the thermometer read.

"Oh, it won't be so bad," said the very young doctor, with a professionally cheerful smile.

Emma McChesney sat up in bed with a jerk. "You mean--sick! Not ill, or grippy, or run down, but sick! Trained-nurse sick! Hospital sick!

Doctor-twice-a-day sick! Table-by-the-bedside-with-bottles-on-it sick!"

"Well--a--" hesitated the doctor, and then took shelter behind a bristling hedge of Latin phrases. Emma McChesney hurdled it at a leap.

"Never mind," she said. "I know." She looked at the faces of those four strangers. Sympathy--real, human sympathy--was uppermost in each.

She smiled a faint and friendly little smile at the group. And at that the housekeeper began tucking in the covers at the foot of the bed, and the lank waitress walked to the window and pulled down the shade, and the bell-boy muttered something about ice-water. The doctor patted her wrist lightly and rea.s.suringly.

"You're all awfully good," said Emma McChesney, her eyes glowing with something other than fever. "I've something to say. It's just this. If I'm going to be sick I'd prefer to be sick right here, unless it's something catching. No hospital. Don't ask me why. I don't know. We people on the road are all alike. Wire T. A. Buck, Junior, of the Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York. You'll find plenty of clean nightgowns in the left-hand tray of my trunk, covered with white tissue paper. Get a nurse that doesn't sniffle, or talk about the palace she nursed in last, where they treated her like a queen and waited on her hand and foot. For goodness' sake, put my switch where nothing will happen to it, and if I die and they run my picture in the _Dry Goods Review_ under the caption, 'Veteran Traveling Saleswoman Succ.u.mbs at Glen Rock,' I'll haunt the editor." She paused a moment.

"Everything will be all right," said the housekeeper, soothingly.

"You'll think you're right at home, it'll be so comfortable. Was there anything else, now?"

"Yes," said Emma McChesney. "The most important of all. My son, Jock McChesney, is fishing up in the Canadian woods. A telegram may not reach him for three weeks. They're shifting about from camp to camp.

Try to get him, but don't scare him too much. You'll find the address under J. in my address book in my handbag. Poor kid. Perhaps it's just as well he doesn't know."

Perhaps it was. At any rate it was true that had the tribe of McChesney been as the leaves of the trees, and had it held a family reunion in Emma McChesney's little hotel bedroom, it would have mattered not at all to her. For she _was_ sick--doctor-three-times-a- day-trained-nurse-bottles-by-the-bedside sick, her head, with its bright hair rumpled and dry with the fever, tossing from side to side on the lumpy hotel pillow, or lying terribly silent and inert against the gray-white of the bed linen. She never quite knew how narrowly she escaped that picture in the _Dry Goods Review_.

Then one day the fever began to recede, slowly, whence fevers come, and the indefinable air of suspense and repression that lingers about a sick-room at such a crisis began to lift imperceptibly. There came a time when Emma McChesney asked in a weak but sane voice:

"Did Jock come? Did they cut off my hair?"

"Not yet, dear," the nurse had answered to the first, "but we'll hear in a day or so, I'm sure." And, "Your lovely hair! Well, not if I know it!" to the second.

The spirit of small-town kindliness took Emma McChesney in its arms.

The dingy little hotel room glowed with flowers. The story of the sick woman fighting there alone in the terrors of delirium had gone up and down about the town. Housewives with a fine contempt for hotel soups sent broths of chicken and beef. The local members of the U. C. T.

sent roses enough to tax every vase and wash-pitcher that the hotel could muster, and asked their wives to call at the hotel and see what they could do. The wives came, obediently, but with suspicion and distrust in their eyes, and remained to pat Emma McChesney's arm, ask to read aloud to her, and to indulge generally in that process known as "cheering her up." Every traveling man who stopped at the little hotel on his way to Minneapolis added to the heaped-up offerings at Emma McChesney's shrine. Books and magazines a.s.sumed the proportions of a library. One could see the hand of T. A. Buck, Junior, in the cases of mineral water, quarts of wine, cunning cordials and tiny bottles of liqueur that stood in convivial rows on the closet shelf and floor. There came letters, too, and telegrams with such phrases as "let nothing be left undone" and "spare no expense" under T. A. Buck, Junior's, signature.

So Emma McChesney climbed the long, weary hill of illness and pain, reached the top, panting and almost spent, rested there, and began the easy descent on the other side that led to recovery and strength. But something was lacking. That sunny optimism that had been Emma McChesney's most valuable a.s.set was absent. The blue eyes had lost their brave laughter. A despondent droop lingered in the corners of the mouth that had been such a rare mixture of firmness and tenderness. Even the advent of Fat Ed Meyers, her keenest compet.i.tor, and representative of the Strauss Sans-silk Company, failed to awaken in her the proper spirit of antagonism. Fat Ed Meyers sent a bunch of violets that devastated the violet beds at the local greenhouse. Emma McChesney regarded them listlessly when the nurse lifted them out of their tissue wrappings. But the name on the card brought a tiny smile to her lips.

"He says he'd like to see you, if you feel able," said Miss Haney, the nurse, when she came up from dinner.

Emma McChesney thought a minute. "Better tell him it's catching," she said.

"He knows it isn't," returned Miss Haney. "But if you don't want him, why--"

"Tell him to come up," interrupted Emma McChesney, suddenly.

A faint gleam of the old humor lighted up her face when Fat Ed Meyers painfully tip-toed in, brown derby in hand, his red face properly doleful, brown shoes squeaking. His figure loomed mountainous in a light-brown summer suit.

"Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" he began, heavily humorous. "Couldn't you find anything better to do in the middle of the season? Say, on the square, girlie, I'm dead sorry. Hard luck, by gosh! Young T. A.

himself went out with a line in your territory, didn't he? I didn't think that guy had it in him, darned if I did."

"It was sweet of you to send all those violets, Mr. Meyers. I hope you're not disappointed that they couldn't have been worked in the form of a pillow, with 'At Rest' done in white curlycues."

"Mrs. McChesney!" Ed Meyers' round face expressed righteous reproof, pain, and surprise. "You and I may have had a word, now and then, and I will say that you dealt me a couple of low-down tricks on the road, but that's all in the game. I never held it up against you. Say, n.o.body ever admired you or appreciated you more than I did--"

"Look out!" said Emma McChesney. "You're speaking in the past tense.

Please don't. It makes me nervous."

Ed Meyers laughed, uncomfortably, and glanced yearningly toward the door. He seemed at a loss to account for something he failed to find in the manner and conversation of Mrs. McChesney.

"Son here with you, I suppose," he asked, cheerily, sure that he was on safe ground at last.

Emma McChesney closed her eyes. The little room became very still. In a panic Ed Meyers looked helplessly from the white face, with its hollow cheeks and closed eyelids to the nurse who sat at the window.

That discreet damsel put her finger swiftly to her lips, and shook her head. Ed Meyers rose, hastily, his face a shade redder than usual.

"Well, I guess I gotta be running along. I'm tickled to death to find you looking so fat and sa.s.sy. I got an idea you were just stalling for a rest, that's all. Say, Mrs. McChesney, there's a swell little dame in the house named Riordon. She's on the road, too. I don't know what her line is, but she's a friendly kid, with a bunch of talk. A woman always likes to have another woman fussin' around when she's sick. I told her about you, and how I'd bet you'd be crazy to get a chance to talk shop and Featherlooms again. I guess you ain't lost your interest in Featherlooms, eh, what?"

Emma McChesney's face indicated not the faintest knowledge of Featherloom Petticoats. Ed Meyers stared, aghast. And as he stared there came a little knock at the door--a series of staccato raps, with feminine knuckles back of them. The nurse went to the door, disapproval on her face. At the turning of the k.n.o.b there bounced into the room a vision in an Alice-blue suit, plumes to match, pearl earrings, elaborate coiffure of reddish-gold and a complexion that showed an unbelievable trust in the credulity of mankind.

"How-do, dearie!" exclaimed the vision. "You poor kid, you! I heard you was sick, and I says, 'I'm going up to cheer her up if I have to miss my train out to do it.' Say, I was laid up two years ago in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and believe me, I'll never forget it. I don't know how sick I was, but I don't even want to remember how lonesome I was. I just clung to the chamber-maid like she was my own sister. If your nurse wants to go out for an airing I'll sit with you. Glad to."

"That's a grand little idea," agreed Ed Meyers. "I told 'em you'd brighten things up. Well, I'll be going. You'll be as good as new in a week, Mrs. McChesney, don't you worry. So long." And he closed the door after himself with apparent relief.

Miss Haney, the nurse, was already preparing to go out. It was her regular hour for exercise. Mrs. McChesney watched her go with a sinking heart.

"Now!" said Miss Riordon, comfortably, "we girls can have a real, old- fashioned talk. A nurse isn't human. The one I had in Idaho Falls was strictly prophylactic, and antiseptic, and she certainly could give the swell alcohol rubs, but you can't get chummy with a human disinfectant. Your line's skirts, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Land, I've heard an awful lot about you. The boys on the road certainly speak something grand of you. I'm really jealous. Say, I'd love to show you some of my samples for this season. They're just great. I'll just run down the hall to my room--"

She was gone. Emma McChesney shut her eyes, wearily. Her nerves were twitching. Her thoughts were far, far away from samples and sample cases. So he had turned out to be his worthless father's son after all! He must have got some news of her by now. And he ignored it. He was content to amuse himself up there in the Canadian woods, while his mother--

Miss Riordon, flushed, and panting a little, burst into the room again, sample-case in hand.

"Lordy, that's heavy! It's a wonder I haven't killed myself before now, wrestling with those blamed things."

Mrs. McChesney sat up on one elbow as Miss Riordon tugged at the sample-case cover. Then she leaned forward, interested in spite of herself at sight of the pile of sheer, white, exquisitely embroidered and lacy garments that lay disclosed as the cover fell back.

"Oh, lingerie! That's an ideal line for a woman. Let's see the yoke in that first nightgown. It's a really wonderful design."

Miss Riordon laughed and shook out the folds of the topmost garment.

"Nightgown!" she said, and laughed again. "Take another look."

"Why, what--" began Emma McChesney.