All the time she was dressing she heard Jack singing lustily in the next room. He was impatient to try the new brace, and paused between solos to exhort her to greater haste. She knelt just an instant by the low window-seat. The prayer she made was one of the shortest she had ever uttered, and one of the most heartfelt: "Give me this day my daily bread." That was all; yet it included everything—strength, courage, temporal help, disappointments or blessings—anything the dear Father saw she needed in her spiritual growth. When she arose from her knees, it was with a feeling of perfect security and peace. No matter what the day might bring forth, she would take it trustingly, and be thankful.
About an hour after breakfast she wheeled Jack to a front window. It was growing very warm again.
"It doesn't hurt me at all to sit up with this brace on," he said. "If you like, I'll help you practice, while I watch people go by on the street." He had often helped her gain stenographic speed by dictating rapid sentences. He read too slowly to be of any service that way, but he knew yards of nursery rhymes that he could repeat with amazing rapidity.
"I know there isn't a lawyer living that can make a speech as fast as I can say the piece about 'Who killed Cock Robin,'" he remarked when he first proposed such dictation; "and I can say the 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' verse fast enough to make you dizzy."
Bethany's pencil was flying as rapidly as the boy's tongue, when they heard a cheery voice in the hall.
"It's Cousin Ray!" cried Jack. "I have felt all morning that something nice was going to happen, and now it has." Then he called out in a tragic tone, "'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.'"
"You saucy boy!" laughed Mrs. Marion, as she appeared in the doorway. "I think he is decidedly better, Bethany; you need not worry about him any longer."
She stooped to kiss his forehead, and drop a great yellow pear in his lap.
"No; I haven't time to stay," she said, when Bethany insisted on taking her hat. "I am to entertain the Missionary Society this afternoon, and Dr. Bascom has given me an unusually long list of the 'sick and in prison' kind to look after this month. It gives me an 'all out of breath' sensation every time I think of all that ought to be attended to."