Moses had opened the front door, and as Caroline entered, she glanced quickly about her, trying to discover if there had been any changes. But the house was unaltered. It was like a greenhouse from which the rarest blossom had been removed, leaving still a subtle and penetrating perfume. All the profusion of detail, the dubious taste, the warmth of colour, and the lavishness of decoration, were still there. From the drawing-room she caught the sheen of pink silk, and she imagined for an instant that Angelica's fair head drooped, like a golden lily, among the surroundings she had chosen. There was a lack of discrimination, she saw now even more plainly than on that first afternoon, but there was an abundance of dramatic effect. One might imagine one's self in any character—even the character of an angel—with a background like that!
As she drew near to the nursery door she heard Letty's voice exclaiming excitedly, "There's Miss Meade, mammy, I hear Miss Meade coming!" Then Mammy Riah opened the door, and the next minute the child was stretching out her arms and crying with pleasure.
"I asked father to send for you," she said, "I told him you could make me well faster than Miss Bradley." She appeared to Caroline to have grown unnaturally tall and thin, like the picture of Alice in Wonderland they used to laugh over together. Her face was curiously transparent and "peaked," as Mrs. Timberlake had said, and the flush of fever could not disguise the waxen look of the skin. In her straight little nightgown, which was fastened close at the throat, and with the big blue bow on the top of her smooth brown head, she looked so wistful and pathetic that she brought a lump to Caroline's throat. Was it any wonder that Blackburn was anxious when she gazed up at him like that?
"I want to hurry up and get well, Miss Meade," she began, "because it makes father so unhappy when I am sick. It really hurts father dreadfully."
"But you're getting well. There isn't much the matter, is there, mammy?"
"She'd be jes ez peart ez I is, ef'n Miss Matty 'ould quit pokin' physic down 'er thoat. Dar ain' nuttin' else in de worl' de matter wid 'er. Whut you reckon Miss Matty know about hit? Ain't she done been teckin' physic day in en day out sence befo' de flood, en ain't she all squinched up, en jes ez yaller ez a punkin, now?"
"I don't mind the medicine if it will make me well," said the child.
"And you take what the doctor gives you too?"
"Oh, yes, I take that too. Between them," she added with a sigh, "there is a great deal to take."
"It is because you are growing so fast. You are a big girl now."