“I have sometimes fancied you were in the room, Kitsy. I saw you quite plain—your freckles and your dear little cocked nose.”
At this description of herself Kitty knelt in a delighted heap by Johnnie’s bed, and rubbed her face round and round on his red flannel sleeve, very much like an affectionate pussy.
“I have cried so much since you were ill,” she went on after awhile. “One day I wetted seven pocket handkerchiefs with my tears. I hung them up to dry. I counted them—there were seven.”
Johnnie’s eyes glistened with sympathy, and he repeated in his feeble voice:
“Poor old Kitsy!”
“It was the day,” went on Kitty, wishing to be exact, “that mother said I was to say in my prayers, ‘Pray God, leave us little Johnnie; but thy will be done.’ I prayed all day, I kept going down on my knees, and every time I waked up in the night I said ‘Leave us little Johnnie.’ I did not say ‘Thy will be done.’ I said ‘Leave us little Johnnie, leave us little Johnnie.’”
There was a silence; then Johnnie said in an odd sort of a way:
“I know what day that was. It was the day I saw my guardian child.”
“Your guardian child!” repeated Kitty curiously.