‘If you will promise me to be as quiet as mice,’ she whispered, ‘you shall both have one peep at her.’
The room into which she led them on tiptoe was almost dark. The only light that was admitted came from one small window in the farther corner, and it was just enough to reveal Jill, as she bent over the bed with a cup in her hand. Then she moved away, and the two children, peeping from their hiding-place behind the screen by the door, saw Barbara.
She lay flat on her back among the white pillows; a hillock under the bedclothes showed where the cage protected her broken leg, and a bandage round her head kept the thick, dark hair from tumbling over her face as it usually did. Otherwise, she was not nearly so much altered as her play-fellows had vaguely expected to find her. The bright little eyes gleamed out as impishly as ever from beneath the white bandage, and as she smiled up at Jill they realised to their intense relief that the Babe, with a hole in her head and a cage over her leg, was much the same Babe who had arrived in their midst, with her elf-like look and her happy unconscious smile, three months ago.
‘Why, Jean, I do believe you’re crying,’ said Angela, in surprise, when Miss Finlayson had pushed them outside again, and they were retreating slowly along the gallery. Angela herself felt no further inclination to cry, now that she had seen the Babe and found she was not a bit altered. There was no middle course in Angela’s emotions, and her only wonder now was why any one had made a fuss about Barbara’s accident at all.
But the tears were raining down Jean’s cheeks for the first time, and the hard, queer look was gone from her face. She flung herself away to her own room, and left Angela to puzzle over her behaviour as best she might.
CHAPTER XVII
SEVEN TIMES ROUND THE WORLD
‘Have the girls gone home?’ asked the invalid, about a week later. She had made such strides towards recovery that she was to be allowed her first visitor that day, and she could not help wondering whether Jean Murray was going to be the privileged person. Everything had been so strange and quiet since the morning she had woke up in Finny’s bed; and she had slept away so many hours of the days that followed, that she had lost count of the time altogether. She seemed to have been lying in a kind of delicious enchantment, with people doing things for her just as though she were a princess; while Jill was always at hand to tell her stories in her beautiful soft voice, whenever she grew tired of lying still. For Jill was the nicest person in the world to be with, when one was enchanted; she never bothered, and she always seemed to come to the rescue just in time, when the pain of being strapped in one position began to grow intolerable. Then, there was the Doctor too. No one would have expected the Doctor to turn out such a trump. Only to-day, after being so strict in the morning about what she was to eat, he had run in again after lunch to bring her a packet of sweets. They were very wholesome sweets, as he had assured Jill; but still they were sweets, and a doctor who was a beast would never have thought of bringing them, even if they were wholesome. So, clearly, he was not a beast. Even Jill had been surprised at his coming twice in one day, now that she was so much better; so that showed that he must be a particularly nice sort of doctor. For Jill had once nursed Auntie Anna when she was ill, and she knew a lot about doctors, so she would not have been surprised at his coming twice in one day, if it had been a usual thing for a doctor to do. Babs smiled happily to herself as she settled the Doctor’s claims to niceness; then she remembered that she was going to have a visitor after tea, and she asked again if the girls had gone home.
‘Yes, they went five or six days ago,’ said Jill, without impatience, though she had answered the same question once already. Babs certainly did not need an illness to make her absent-minded.
‘Then who is coming to see me after tea?’ was Barbara’s next inquiry.