noon, my dear; your breakfast shall be brought to you in your room,
where a fire shall be made, and such treatment shown you as if you were
my own child."

"Oh! what have I done that you should be so gentle to me?" exclaims
Moll, smothering another cough. And with that she reaches out her leg
under the table and fetches me a kick of the shin, looking all the while
as pitiful and innocent as any painted picture. "Would it be well to
fetch in a doctor?" says Don Sanchez, when Moll was gone barking
upstairs. "The child looks delicate, though she eats with a fairly good
appetite."

"'Tis nothing serious," replies Jack, who had doubtless received the
same hint from Moll she had given me. "I warrant she will be mended in a
day or so, with proper care. 'Tis a kind of family complaint. I am taken
that way at times," and with that he rasps his throat as a hint that he
would be none the worse for sleeping a night between sheets.

This was carrying the matter too far, and I thought it had certainly
undone us; for stopping short, with a start, in crossing the room, he
turns and looks first at Dawson, then at me, with anything but a
pleasant look in his eyes as finding his dignity hurt, to be thus
bustled by a mere child. Then his dark eyebrows unbending with the
reflection, maybe, that it was so much the better to his purpose that
Moll could so act as to deceive him, he seats himself gravely, and
replies to Jack:

"Your family wit may get you a night's lodging, but I doubt if you will
ever merit it so well as your daughter."