little sketching and a
little letter-writing, but she was too restless and anxious to get on
with either.

All the comfort she got was now and then Mrs. Bury telling her that she
need not be frightened, and giving her a book to read; and after the
midday meal her uncle was desired by Mrs. Bury, who had evidently assumed
the management of him, to take the child out walking, for the doctor
could not come for hours, and Lady Northmoor had better be left to sleep.

So they wandered out into the pinewoods, preoccupied and silent, gazing
along the path, as if that would hasten the doctor. Constance had
perceived that questions were discouraged, and did her best to keep from
being troublesome by trying to busy herself with a bouquet of mountain
flowers.

The little German doctor came so late that he had to remain all night,
but his coming, as well as that of a brisk American brother and sister,
seemed to have cheered things up a good deal. Mrs. Bury talked to the
German, and the Americans asked so many questions that answering them
made things quite lively. Indeed, Constance was allowed to wish her aunt
good-night, and seeing her look just like herself on her pillows, much
relieved her mind.

CHAPTER XX
RATZES

Things began to fall into their regular course at Ratzes, Lady Northmoor
was in a day or two able to come into Mrs. Bury's sitting-room for a few
hours every day; but there she lay on a folding chaise-longue that had
been arranged for her, languid but bright, reading, working, looking at
Mrs. Bury's drawings, and keeping the diary of the adventures of the
others.

Her husband would fain never have left her, but he had to take his baths.
These were in the lower story of the larger chalet. They were taken in
rows of pinewood boxes in the vault. He muttered that it felt very like
going alive into his coffin, when, like others, he laid himself down in
the rust-coloured liquid, 'each in his narrow cell' in iron 'laid,' with
his head on a shelf, and a lid closing up to his chin, and he was
uncheered by conversation, as all the other patients were Austrians of
the lower middle class, and their Tyrolean dialect would have been hard
to understand even by German scholars. However, the treatment certainly
did him good, and entirely drove away his neuralgia, he walked, rode, and
climbed a good deal with Constance and a lad attached to the
establishment, whose German Constance could just understand. And while