Keble.
The Leukerbad section of the party had only three days' start of the
others, for Jock was not released till after a whole month's course
of the baths, and Armine's state fluctuated so much that the journey
would not have been sooner possible.
It had been a trying time. While Dr. Medlicott thought he could not
rouse Mrs. Brownlow to the sense of the little fellow's precarious
condition, deadly alarm lay couched in the bottom of her heart, only
kept at bay by defiantly cheerful plans and sanguine talk.
Then Jock was depressed, and at his age (and, alas! at many others)
being depressed means being cross, and very cross he was to his
mother and his friend, and occasionally to his brother, who, in some
moods, seemed to him merely a rival invalid and candidate for
attention, and whom he now and then threatened with becoming as
frightful a muff as Fordham. He missed Johnny, too, and perhaps
longed after Eton. He was more savage to Cecil than to any one else,
treating his best attentions with growls, railings, and occasionally
showers of slippers, books, and cushions, but, strange as it sounds,
the friendship only seemed cemented by this treatment, and this
devoted slave evidently preferred being abused by Jock to being made
much of by any one else.
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