“Are they going to leave you then?”
“Yes. Mrs. Phillips’s sister is so much better, and has made so many friends in California, that she is going to live there altogether, and Mrs. Phillips will take a house somewhere in the city. Oh, by the way, I wonder we never thought of it, but perhaps Mrs. Brown would like to rent her house, if she goes with Annis. I must suggest it. Oh, dear, what shall I do without Annis?”
But strange interventions remove our threatened troubles, and, after all, Annis did not go to college that year; for shortly after her return home she was stricken down with typhoid fever, and the snow was on the ground before she so much as dared to venture out of doors.
Her devotion to Persis made itself manifest all through the long illness, and she could scarcely bear to have her friend out of her sight; so Persis would take her work to Annis’s room, look over proof or read manuscripts while the patient slept, and be ready to minister to her when she awoke.
“It is so very quiet at our house nowadays; it doesn’t seem like the same place,” Persis told her cousin. “With the boys gone, and Lisa away, it is so desolate. Mellicent is at school all the morning, and she is not noisy at the best of times. The boys come in very often; for, although they have a very pleasant boarding-place, they say it is not like home, and they pop in on us at all sorts of odd times. Do you know, Annis, for all that I feel awfully sorry that you have been so ill, I am mean enough to have a little glad feeling ’way down inside of me because you didn’t go to college after all. Aren’t you ashamed of myself?”
Annis, with her little pale face, big eyes, and closely cropped head, was sitting up in a large chair by the window. “Well, no,” she answered, after a pause, “I’m not a bit ashamed of yourself. I should feel the same; and as it is I am rather glad. I did hate to think of going without you, and I quite enjoy the getting well. It is nice to have you here every day where I can see you. You are so nice and healthy-looking, Persis.”
“I certainly am not puny, for I am not working myself to death. I think, after all, it has turned out for the best. I think it would have been almost too much for the family if I had gone away too. I hope we shall see Lisa before next fall, and then I can leave without feeling so compuncted.”
Annis laughed at the word. “Tell me about the paper. I like to hear about it.”
“Oh, it’s great fun! I get such funny manuscripts to look over, and such absurd letters come. You know, of course, I am not a bonâ fide editor. I only have a certain part of the work to do. It is very interesting, and I think I shall earn enough to help me through the first year at college. I don’t know where the rest is to come from; but, as Mellicent once wrote in a letter, ‘I keep hopping.’”
“Do you know, Persis,” said Annis, “I have been talking about something to mamma, and I want you to say ‘yes’ before I tell you.”