“You? I can hardly believe it!” she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable little hat symbolized a biting poverty.
“Hilda! Hilda!” was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He was aghast.
“I am glad to see you,” she said, and her voice had a forced gayety over its real weakness; “I haven’t seen any of my people for so long, except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn’t it? Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and mamma is much, much better. As for papa, the last time I heard from him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that he hasn’t been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking.”
Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control.
“If I had known I would have come sooner,” he said; “you would have let me help you, wouldn’t you?”
“I am afraid you couldn’t have helped me. That is the worst of illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up.”
“My poor child!” Odd inwardly cursed himself. “If I had known! What have you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look—“
“Fagged, don’t I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We’ll all go to the vernissage together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for mamma.”
“Taylor helped you, I suppose?”
“Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed her.” There was an explanatory note in Hilda’s voice; indeed Odd’s silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. “It made double duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not minded.”