His voice trailed away to a gasping whisper, but Beatrice knew what he wished to ask.
“She came to find you,” she answered. “You shall hear all about it. No, don’t move; it will make your arm begin to bleed again. Lie still and we will tell you everything.”
With the wind howling over their heads, but with the slow heat of the fire keeping the worst of the cold at bay, they sat there by him and told the whole of their tale. Sometimes one of them would get up to throw some more fuel upon the flame and the other would take up the story in the interval. Now and then he would ask a half-audible question, but mostly he lay quite quiet, his steady eyes—how like they were to Aunt Anna’s!—fixed upon the face of the girl who was speaking. When the account was finished, he had various things to ask, often with long pauses for rest between the words.
“Do you live in the same house—it was the one where your father and Anna and I were born? Does Bridget Flynn still stay with you? Which of you sleeps in the blue room where on stormy nights you can hear the rain in the big chimney?”
Yes, they lived in the house he knew. Bridget Flynn, the old nurse who had cared for them all, was not with them but was still alive. Beatrice had the big south room—it was green now,—but the rain in the chimney was just the same.
“How it does come back!” he said at last with a sigh; “and to think that I have been such a fool as to believe that I could put all that I loved so much behind me.”
His voice failed after that and his questions ceased. They could hear his faint breathing and feel the thin, uneven pulse in his wrist, but he did not move or give other sign of life. The night had closed about them, the storm was still blowing louder, and the cold growing more intense. Snow was piling about the tent, eddying through the opening, lying in white drifts even among the folds of the blankets.
They crept back to the fire at last, both of them wondering miserably at the heaviness of his stupor, but trying to assure themselves that it was really sleep. Very closely they huddled together, sharing the single blanket that was wrapped about them, saying very little but thinking very much.
“Aunt Anna will be going to bed now,” Nancy observed, after such long quiet that Beatrice had thought she was nodding. “Christina will be lighting the lamps and tucking in the fur rugs on the sleeping-porch.”
Since Beatrice scarcely answered, but sat staring, though with unseeing eyes, at the red coals, Nancy spoke again.