"I shall be ready soon after tea; but I must go and see Jessie Collins before I go, for she wants me to bring her some meat from the market."
"How is the poor girl?" asked Brown. "It must be hard for her to lie still after having the run of the street as she has had."
"The worst of it is she doesn't lie still," said Mrs. Brown; "it is almost impossible, I suppose, with only little Polly to do everything. Of course Jessie tries to sit up and help her with things, when she is in a muddle, and, as I tell her, every time she does this she is undoing all the good that has been done, and making her foot worse."
"Ah! she ought to have gone to the hospital when it was first hurt," remarked Brown.
"She should too, if she had been my child; but her father didn't want her to go, you could see, and Jessie wanted to be at home to look after her mother. I never saw a girl so fond of her mother as poor Jessie is, and to think I should have had such a bad opinion of her! I feel vexed with myself when I think of it sometimes," added Mrs. Brown.
"The girl's good qualities have been brought out by her mother's illness," remarked Brown. "How is the poor thing now?" he asked.
"Not much better. She is just a 'poor thing,' and lies there in bed, without any wish to stir herself, and help things downstairs."
"But is she well enough to do that? I thought you said she was very ill."
"So she was at first; but the doctor has told her to try and sit up a little while, and he told me it would do her good if she made some effort to get about. But when I have asked her to try and do as the doctor says, she promises to try to-morrow. But that to-morrow never comes, and she just lies there, day after day, and nothing seems to rouse her; nor will she take the least interest in home affairs. 'Jessie can manage things now,' she says, if I try to persuade her to get up."
"'But Jessie has hurt her foot, and ought to go to the hospital,' I said to her yesterday; but she only sighed, and said things would come right somehow, and 'Jessie liked to stop at home.'"