I tried to sit up, but the pain was so great that I sank back, having hard work not to cry out; and seeing this, with a tenderness for which I should not have given her credit, she gently raised me and backed the pillows up, so as to support me; and then, finding that this was not sufficient, she ran out of the kitchen, to return in a few minutes, doubling up what I knew was her best shawl, which she now formed into a cushion. "There, now we shall do," she said cheerily; and, pouring out a cup of tea, she tasted and added milk till it was to her liking, and then held it to my lips. It was like nectar, and I gave her a grateful look for that which seemed to impart new life to my bruised body. "Now, you've got to eat some toast," she said, and I stared at her in wonder, for it seemed to be a new Mary upon whom I gazed. "I couldn't eat a bit," I said helplessly. "But you must," she said imperatively. "Now look here, you have had hardly anything since breakfast, and if you don't eat, you can't get well." I took the toast she held to me, and managed to eat it. That done, I had another cup of tea, and the sickly faint feeling I had had every time I moved seemed less overpowering; and at last I lay back there, listening helplessly to Mary as she chatted to me and washed up the tea-things. "Don't you trouble about them; they won't come in my kitchen. He's ill in bed, or pretending to be, and the doctor says he ain't to move for a week. I hope he mayn't for a month--a brute! I never see such a cowardly trick. I wish my William had him. He's going to have the law of Mr Wooster, so Mr Emmett the constable told me; and him and the doctor'll make out a nice case between 'em, I know. Pah! I hate lawyers and doctors. So you make yourself comfortable. I'll be your doctor, and if they ain't pretty civil to me, I'll be your lawyer, too, and go to the madgistrits, see if I don't. If I was you I wouldn't stay with 'em a minnit after I got well. I shan't; I'm sick of 'em." "I wish I could go, Mary," I said, "but I don't want to go now you've been so kind." "Kind! Stuff! It's only my way. There ain't a better-tempered girl nowheres than I am; only when you come to live in a house where the master's a snarling, biting, growling hound, and the missus is a fault-finding, scolding, murmuring himidge, it's enough to put out a hartchangel. But I say, if I was you, and could write such a lovely hand, I should send and tell my father and mother. Oh, I am sorry, dear--I forgot about your poor father and mother. But I would write and tell somebody."