‘Oh, so ill! He—he has been ill now for three weeks. The cold, that hurt him.’ She lifts her face for a moment, struggles with herself, and then lowers her head again, as if to do something to Bonnie’s little necktie, lest he should see her tears.
‘Tell me about it,’ says Crosby, drawing up a chair and seating himself close to her and the boy. There is something so friendly, so sympathetic, in his action that the poor child’s heart expands.
‘Oh, you can’t think how bad it has been!’ she says. ‘This dreadful cold seems to get into him. Speak very low. He slept hardly two hours the whole of last night.’
‘How do you know that?’—quickly.
‘How should I not know?’—surprised. ‘I slept with him. Who should know if I didn’t?’
‘Then you did not even sleep two hours?’
‘Oh, what does it matter about me?’ says she in a low, impatient tone. ‘Think of him. All last night he cried—he cried dreadfully. And what cut me to the heart,’ says the girl in an agonized tone, ‘was that I think sometimes he was keeping back his tears, for fear they should grieve me. Oh, how he suffers! Mr. Crosby’—suddenly, almost sharply—‘should people, should little, lovely, darling children like this, suffer so horribly, and when it is no fault of their own? Oh’—passionately—‘it is frightful! it is wrong! Father is sometimes angry with me about saying it, but how can God be so cruel?’
Her tone vibrates with wild and angry grief, yet still she keeps it low. It strikes Crosby as wonderful that, through all her violent agitation, she never forgets the child sleeping in her arms.
He says nothing, however. Who could, to comfort her, in an hour like this? He bends over the sleeping child and looks at him. Such a small face, and so lovely, in spite of the furrows pain has laid upon it. How clearly writ they are! And yet the child is like Susan—strangely like. In the young blooming face, bending over the emaciated one, the likeness can be traced.
‘You think—you think——’ whispers Susan eagerly, following his gaze, and demanding an answer to it.