"Wishful for me to go?"
She began to speak, but stopped, since her words would have to deal with the incidents of her mother's death.
"I dearly hope you'll do it when you can."
"No, no; but thank the man. You shall go to him. I won't be so selfish about you as I have been. I've kept your light under a bushel too long, because you were all I had left. Others must share you, I reckon. You're pale as a davered rose through so much nursing. You shall go presently and make a good holiday with the old chap."
He asked constantly for William, and hoped that each fine day might bring him.
"I've got a wonderful thing to tell him, that only such a man would understand," he explained to Nurse Woolcombe.
They concealed the fact that Mr. Marydrew had been ill with bronchitis.
Then Auna went to see him and was able to tell her father that Billy had returned to health, after a chill.
"He's all right and is coming up the first soft day in May," she promised.
Jacob himself began to regain strength, and there fell a morning when Auna went to Brent to bid a barber climb to Huntingdon and shave him.