“It certainly is,” I answered. “I will put it in my diary, and some day when you are a big fat man Ellie will read it aloud to you, and we will both laugh.”
“Why will we laugh, Ellie dear?” asked Robin, innocently.
“Because we will be so glad that the little sick boy who composed it grew up strong and well,” I answered.
And so I have written “the poem” here, that I may be able to fulfil my part of the prophecy.
But now I want to talk a little of Geoffrey, for we are really anxious about him. There is no doubt the boy is very much changed.
Yesterday afternoon he dropped in to see Ernie nearly an hour before school was out.
“Why, Geof,” I said, “what are you doing here so early? It is scarcely two o’clock. Ernie isn’t home yet. Did you have a half-holiday?”
Geoffrey looked confused. “’Guess your clocks are wrong,” he answered. “Can you give a fellow a bit of lunch, Elizabeth?”
“I thought you got your lunch at school,” I returned. “But, of course,—if you are hungry. Rose has just finished baking. Isn’t that luck?” And I ran down to the kitchen, where a glass of milk, a couple of bananas, and a plate of hot ginger-bread were quickly collected.
Geof ate in silence, crumbling his ginger-bread over the tray cloth on the library table.