He took the thin hands in his, both of them, just as he had done John’s a moment before, and was moved almost to tears by the pallid face. Elizabeth’s brown eyes had fallen back into her bony, sharp-lined head, and her nose was thin and drawn.
“Words fail me, Mrs. Hunter,” he said feelingly.
But though words failed to express Hugh Noland’s sympathy his eyes did not, and the girl, who had not had an hour’s sympathetic companionship since he had been gone, caught the fact and was cheered by it.
Hugh Noland was vital and invigorating. Elizabeth listened to his account of the adventures in Mitchell County. He was a good story-teller and his incidents were well selected. She was too weak to sit up a whole hour and was carried tenderly back to her bed, where the family life centred now that she was becoming able to stand the noise and confusion of it.
During the days which followed, Hugh, at John’s suggestion, brought his books and read aloud to them in that little bedroom in the warm spring evenings, and life in the Hunter house took on a brighter complexion than it had ever before assumed.
John, who had been sleeping in Hugh’s room since Elizabeth’s serious illness, returned to his own bed. He looked about him for Jack the first night and asked where he was.
“I sent him up to Hepsie’s room,” Elizabeth said quietly.
“To sleep!”
“Yes.”
“The children in the Hunter family are not put into the servants’ beds,” John Hunter replied. The unexplained statement was offensive to a man accustomed to being consulted.