“I know—I know,” she said, impatiently, when Catharine urged this, “it is cold, it makes me shiver all over; but then you can guess how it is. I am to take all the cold, too, with the wakefulness and watching, it is a part of me this cold; when I tremble, they smile. Do you know I never smile: that is left to them!”
“Then,” said Catharine, gently, “I will stay with you.”
“No, no. The cold is catching, you will take it!”
“But I must, unless you will go with me!”
“Not there,” pleaded Elsie, pointing to the library.
“No, to our room.”
“Well, if you are cold, I will go!”
After that day, Catharine often found Elsie watching by the library-door, as she came out from her morning studies.
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE ITALIAN VILLA.
Within sight of the library window, and down upon the sloping grounds that rolled in broken hollows to the sea, Catharine had noticed the building of a pretty Italian villa, that for a month or two of the spring had been throwing out some new wing or cornice through the trees that were to embower it. Even the workmen’s hammers could now and then be heard in the stillness of the morning, when nothing but the birds and those who toil for their daily bread are abroad.