"It is the winter that kills little Verry," she said, in a childlike voice. "God's breath is cold over the world, and my life goes. But the spring is coming; it will come back."
I looked at Temperance, whose face was so corrugated with the desire for crying and the effort to keep from it, that for the life of me, I could not help smiling. As soon as I smiled I laughed, and then Temperance gave way to crying and laughing together. Veronica stared, and realized the circumstances in a second. She walked back to the bed, laughing faintly, too. "Go to bed, do. You have been here a long time, have you?"
I left Temperance tucking the clothes about her, kissing her, and calling her "deary and her best child."
I could not go to bed at once, for Fanny was on my hearth before the fire, which she had rekindled, watching the boiling of something.
"She has come to, hasn't she?" stirring the contents of the kettle. "I knew it was going to be so with her, she was so mad with me. She is like the Old Harry before she has a turn, and like an angel after. I am fond of people who have their ups and downs. I have seen her so before. She asked me to keep the doors locked once; they are locked now. But I couldn't keep you out. The doctor said she must have warm drinks as soon as she was better. This is gruel."
"If it is done, away with you. Calamity improves you, don't it? You seem in excellent spirits."
"First-rate; I can be somebody then."
CHAPTER XXV.
Before spring there were three public events in Surrey. A lighthouse was built on Gloster Point, below our house. At night there was a bridge of red, tremulous light between my window and its tower, which seemed to shorten the distance. A town-clock had been placed in the belfry of the new church in the western part of the village. Veronica could see the tips of its gilded hands from the top of her window, and hear it strike through the night, whether the wind was fair to bring the sound or not. She liked to hear the hours cry that they had gone. Soon after the clock was up, she recollected that Mrs. Crossman's dog had ceased to bark at night, as was his wont, and sent her a note inquiring about it, for she thought there was something poetical in connection with nocturnal noises, which she hoped Mrs. Crossman felt also. Fanny conveyed the note, and read it likewise, as Mrs. Crossman declared her inability to read writing with her new spectacles, which a peddler had cheated her with lately. She laughed at it, and sent word to Veronica that she was the curiousest young woman for her age that she had ever heard of; that the dog slept in the house of nights, for he was blind and deaf now; but that Crossman should get a new dog with a loud bark, if the dear child wanted it.
A new dog soon came, so fierce that Abram told Temperance that people were afraid to pass Crossman's. She guessed it wasn't the dog the people were afraid of, but of their evil consciences, which pricked them when they remembered Dr. Snell.