“I am too ashamed of myself to look at you. What must you think of me, Mary Jane?”
“I think I love you, dearly.”
“I don’t see how you can, but I’m glad of it. Where is my mother, nurse?”
Mrs. McClure bent over the cot and kissed her daughter, murmuring tender words of love and delight; and for a space neither remembered Mary Jane.
However, she had just remembered her own mother and the fact that she had been long from home. Also, that that home lay at the end of a long, strange and distracting journey, for one so ignorant of travel as she, and that through the window she could see that it was already twilight. She waited a bit, for a chance to bid good-night to Bonny-Gay and to say how glad she was that she was better, and to thank the nurse for being so kind to herself. But nobody seemed to have any thought for her just then.
The gray-haired father had come into the room and bent beside his wife over the cot where lay their one darling child; and, seeing the parents thus occupied with their own feelings, both nurses had considerately turned their backs upon the scene and were busying themselves in arranging the chamber for the night’s watch.
“I dare not wait a minute longer! I should be afraid, I think, to get in the car alone at night. I was hardly ever out after dark. I’d like to make my manners pretty, as mother said, but I can’t wait.”
Moved by the same delicacy which had made the nurses turn their backs upon the group at the bedside, Mary Jane silently picked up her crutches and hopped away. Finding the way out was easier, even, than finding it in. The halls were now all lighted by wonderful lamps overhead and the same stately footman stood just within the outer entrance.
“However did such a creature as this get in and I not see her?” he wondered, as the little hunchback came swiftly toward him. “Well, better out than in, that’s sure. No knowing what harm it would do the little missy if she caught sight of an object like that!”
Which shows how little the people who live in one house may understand of each other’s ideas; and explains the rapidity with which he showed Mary Jane through the door and closed it upon her.