Lorna came back with an armful of flowers and a vase to hold them. She smiled at Lem.
“That is lovely!” Henrietta said. “Put them where Lem can see them. Come now, we must go down. We will bring you some dinner, Lem.” Miss Susan, when she learned the boy was himself again, assumed once more her attitude of dislike.
“Well, how is he?” she asked, as if even asking that was more than she wanted to do.
“Quite himself again, I think,” said Henrietta. “Lorna took up some flowers.”
“What for?”
“I've heard it said that everything should be as bright and cheerful and pleasant as possible when any one comes out of one of these fits,” said Henrietta. “A child, especially. It is as if one was dead, you know, and coming back into the world again. It ought to be, just at first at least, a nice world. It ought to seem to be a world worth coming back into. If not—”
“What?” asked Susan.
Henrietta shrugged her shoulders “You could n't blame them much for going right back into dead-land again, could you? And staying there? I suppose they do, sometimes.”
“Humph!” exclaimed Susan, but she mentally resolved that, whatever she felt about Lem, no one should ever say she had been the cause of his death. “I don't say I would n't be glad to have him around,” she said grudgingly. “Time and again I've told his father I would admire to have Lem here. But a liar and a thief and a young rowdy I can't abide and I won't have.”
“Lem is not a liar,” said Henrietta quietly. “He tells the truth. Wasn't that the trouble, Susan? You questioned him and he told the truth and it made you angry. Now I never make that mistake,” she continued gayly. “I 'm quite a reprobate. I only tell the truth when it pleases everybody, and if something else pleases better I tell something else.”