Her first move was to the window, which she opened as wide as it would go. Then she straightened the tumbled bedclothes, slipped a cool pillow under the sick woman’s head, and gently sponged the hot face.
In this room, as in the other, plates, cups, basins, and jugs were scattered about in confusion, most of them containing food in some shape or form.
Nell gathered them up as best she could, carrying them to the outer room, to be washed when she had leisure.
Finding a bucket of clean water standing in the little pantry, which opened from the general living-room, she carried a cup of it for the sick woman to drink.
“Ah, how good it is!” murmured the poor thing, opening her eyes and looking at Nell. But there was no surprise in her glance—it was just as if she had expected to see a girl in an old-fashioned blue frock waiting upon her, and with a grateful “Thank you, my dear,” she lay back on the cool pillow and closed her eyes again, only now she did not mutter or moan so much as before.
Having done what was most necessary in the sick-room, Nell stepped out to the other room, and attacked the confusion there. Having lighted the fire, which had gone out from lack of tending, she put a kettle of water on to boil, and then set to work to get the crockery ready for washing.
Absorbed in her work, she forgot how tired she was, and she was stepping briskly to and fro, when the outer door opened, and the man who had shouted to her entered with the dog at his heels.
He stopped short however then, and stared about him in genuine amazement, not at Nell, but at the wonders her hands had wrought in the matters of tidiness.
“My word, how you’ve slicked the place up, and you haven’t been long about it, neither!” he said, in a tone of deep admiration.
He had a stupid, good-natured expression, with a round rosy face like a schoolboy’s; but what puzzled Nell so much was that he talked as if he had been expecting her all day.