They were in the ugly little green-papered room at the hospital, and Caroline was holding Letty tight in her arms, while she interpolated cryptic phrases into the animated talk.
"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would only come back! Do you think you will come back when mother and father get home again? I wrote to father the other day, but I had to write in pencil, and I'm so afraid it will all fade out when it goes over the ocean. Will it get wet, do you think?"
"I am sure it won't, dear, and he will be so glad to hear from you. What did you tell him?"
"I told him how cold it was last winter, and that I couldn't write before because doing all the doctor told me took up every single minute, and I had had to leave off my lessons, and that the new nurse made them very dull, anyhow. Then I said that I wanted you to come back, and that I hadn't been nearly so strong since you went away."
She was looking pale, and after a few moments, Caroline sent her, with a pot of flowers, into an adjoining room.
"I don't like Letty's colour," she said anxiously to the housekeeper, in the child's absence.
"She is looking very badly. It is the hard winter, I reckon, but I am not a bit easy about her. She hasn't picked up after the last cold, and we don't seem able to keep her interested. Children are so easily bored when they are kept indoors, and Letty more easily than most, for she has such a quick mind. I declare I never lived through such a winter—at least not since I was a child in the Civil War, and of course that was a thousand times worse. But we couldn't keep Briarlay warm, even the few rooms that we lived in. It was just like being in prison—and a cold one at that! I can't help wishing that David would come home, for I feel all the time as if anything might happen. I reckon the winter put my nerves on edge; but the war seems to drag on so slowly, and everybody has begun to talk in such a pessimistic way. It may sound un-Christian, but I sometimes feel as if I could hardly keep my hands off the Germans. I get so impatient of the way things are going, I'd like to get over in France, and kill a few of them myself. It does look, somehow, as if the Lord had forgotten that vengeance belongs to Him."
"Doctor Boland told me yesterday that he thought it would last at least five years longer."
"Then it will outlast us, that's all I've got to say." She cleared her throat, and added with tart irrelevancy, "I had a letter from Angelica a few weeks ago."
"Is it true? What the paper said?"