Then everything was so quiet again that I looked round the portière; Phil knelt by the bedside with his face buried in the bed-clothes, and papa's hand was resting on his head.
I let the curtain fall. I felt, perhaps, they'd rather I didn't look at them.
Then presently papa said quite cheerfully, "It will be all right, Phil: I think I am going to get well, and I shall try to take better care of myself; so you will, I hope, have no further occasion to be troubled about my health. I appreciate your speaking frankly to me, as you have done. Now, perhaps, you had better go; I am a little tired."
Phil shook hands with papa and started to go, but paused half-way to the door. "This is for Felix and Betty, as well as for myself, father," he said pleadingly. "They feel just as badly as I do about you, but we thought 'twas best for one to speak for the three; and I being the eldest,—you understand?"
"Yes," papa said gently, "I understand."
As the door closed behind Phil, papa called me. "Jack," he said, in a weak voice, "it seems to me that Miss Appleton is gone a good while; perhaps you had better give me something,—I think I am tired."
My! didn't I get nervous! There was nothing on the table but bottles and a medicine glass; I didn't know any more than the man in the moon what to give him, and I didn't like to ask him. I was pretty sure he didn't know; and besides, he had shut his eyes. I caught up one of the bottles and uncorked and smelled it without in the least knowing what I intended doing next. How I did wish the nurse would come! Just then some one came into the room, and when I turned quickly, expecting to see Miss Appleton, who was it but Betty!
Well, I was so surprised, I nearly dropped the bottle. But she didn't even look at me; she just marched up to papa and began talking.
She stood a little distance from the bed,—she said afterward she was afraid to go nearer for fear she'd shake the bed, or fall on it,—with her hands behind her back, and she just rattled off what she had to say as if she'd been "primed," as Phil calls it. Without even a "how d'you do?" she plunged into her subject. That's Betty all over; she always goes right to the point. "Papa," she said earnestly, "I'm awfully—that is, very, very sorry we went to Mr. Erveng that time about your book, without first speaking to you about it. We're all very sorry,—Phil, Felix, and I,—and just as ashamed as we can be. We've worried dreadfully over it, and about you, and it was simply awful when we thought you were going to die! We didn't acknowledge it to one another, but if you had died, I know we three'd have felt as if we had as much as killed you" (here Betty's voice dropped to almost a whisper; I thought perhaps she was going to cry, but she didn't, she just went on louder); "for we are sure you never would have hurried so with—your book—if we hadn't played that mean joke. You see, papa, we're so afraid you'll—you'll—die, or be ill, or something else dreadful if you don't stop working so hard,—like a galley slave, as Phil says. And I've come to ask you, for Phil, Felix, and myself, to let the hateful old book go, and just get well and strong again; will you?"
"But if the history is completed, it can be sold, and thus bring in the money that is so much needed in the family."