XXXIX
HARRY CALLS TO SAY GOOD-BY
Lillian Underwood kept her promise to Dicky that I should suffer no scar as the result of the burns I received when my dress caught fire on the night of my dinner.
Never patient had a more faithful nurse than Lillian. She had a cot placed in my room where she slept at night, and she rarely left my side.
I found my invalidism very pleasant in spite of the pain and inconvenience of my burns. Everyone was devoted to my comfort. Even Mother Graham's acerbity was softened by the suffering I underwent in the first day or two following the accident, although I soon discovered that she was actually jealous because Lillian and not she was nursing me.
"It is the first time in my life that I have ever found my judgment in nursing set aside as of no value," she said querulously to me one day when she was sitting with me while Lillian attended to the preparation of some special dish for me in the kitchen.
"Oh, Mother Graham," I protested, "please don't look at it that way. You know how careful you have to be about your heart. We couldn't let you undertake the task of nursing me, it would have been too much for you."
"Well, if your own mother were alive I don't believe any one could have kept her from taking care of you," she returned stubbornly.
There was a wistful note in her voice that touched and enlightened me. Beneath all the crustiness of my mother-in-law's disposition there must lie a very real regard—I tremulously wondered if I might not call it love—for me.
My heart warmed toward the lonely, crabbed old woman as it had never done before. I put out my uninjured hand, clasped hers, and drew her toward me.