"There's no time like the present," said Murtagh, and as the others were of his opinion they left Nessa to enter the house alone, and started off with Royal to spend the rest of the afternoon upon the island.
Nessa was glad to be alone. Good-natured as she was, she was too little accustomed to children's society not to be a little fatigued by it, and to-day, especially, for though she had not chosen to seem one bit less bright, she had thought often of Cousin Jane's sad letter about little Frankie.
She was thinking of it again now as she stood by the schoolroom window. But Nessa did not pay much attention to the landscape. She was thinking of the bright, gentle little boy who had so lately been with them, and she, too, felt awed at the thought of death. But she could not believe that he would die; it seemed impossible.
No, no, it would not be; he would get well; he could not die when his mother loved him so. So she persuaded herself; but when, after standing a long while by the window, she happened to look out, the gray dampness of the landscape made her shudder, she did not quite know why, and with a sudden impulsive movement she pulled down the blind. She came over to the fire and poked it into a blaze. Poor little fellow! But, yes, she felt certain he would get well. In Dublin he would be near the best doctors.
She rang for Peggy to put the room in order, and went up-stairs to take her things off and to fetch a book. A quarter of an hour later she was comfortably established on the big brown sofa by the fire, and her unpleasant impressions were forgotten in a book that interested her immensely.
But as she was coming to the very climax of the story she was startled out of her abstraction by Peggy's entrance with a tray of rattling tea-things.
"It wants ten minutes of dinner-time, Miss," remarked that maiden in a tone of respectful admonition.
"What!" exclaimed Nessa. "The whole afternoon gone already! And the children, too; they have not come in!"
But there was no time for exclamations; climax or no climax, the nine pages that remained of her book had to be left till after dinner; and, as it was, her evening toilette had to be made with a truly fairylike rapidity.
When after dinner she returned to the schoolroom and found tea still untouched, she only concluded that their fireplace had taken longer to build than they had expected.