“Oh!—you dear, DEAR thing!” she cried, tossing her parasol on Pawson's table and stretching out her arms toward him sitting in his chair. “Oh, I am so sorry! Why didn't you let me know you were ill? I would have gone down to Wesley. Oh!—I KNEW something was the matter with you or you would have answered my letters.”
He had struggled to his feet at the first sound of her footsteps in the hall, and had her in his arms long before she had finished her greeting;—indeed her last sentence was addressed to the collar of his coat against which her cheek was cushioned.
“Who said I was ill?” he asked with one of his bubbling laughs when he got his breath.
“Todd told Ben—and you ARE!—and it breaks my heart.” She was holding herself off now, scanning his pale face and shrunken frame—“Oh, I am so sorry you did not let me know!”
“Todd is a chatterer, and Ben no better; I've only had a bad cold—and you couldn't have done me a bit of good if you had come—and now I am entirely well, never felt better in my life. Oh—but it's good to get hold of you, Kate,—and you are still the same bunch of roses. Sit down now and tell me all about it. I wish I had a better chair for you, my dear, but the place is quite dismantled, as you see. I expected to stay the winter when I left.”
She had not given a thought to the chair or to the changes—had not even noticed them. That the room was stripped of its furniture prior to a long stay was what invariably occurred in her own house every summer: it was her precious uncle's pale, shrunken face and the blue veins that showed in the backs of his dear transparent hands which she held between her own, and the thin, emaciated wrists that absorbed her.
“You poor, dear Uncle George!” she purred—“and nobody to look after you.” He had drawn up Pawson's chair and had placed her in it beside the one he sat in, and had then dropped slowly into his own, the better to hide from her his weakness—but it did not deceive her. “I'm going to have you put back to bed this very minute; you are not strong enough to sit up. Let me call Aunt Jemima.”
St. George shook his head good-naturedly in denial and smoothed her hands with his fingers.
“Call nobody and do nothing but sit beside me and let me look into your face and listen to your voice. I have been pretty badly shaken up; had two weeks of it that couldn't have been much worse—but since then I have been on the mend and am getting stronger every minute. I haven't had any medicine and I don't want any now—I just want you and—” he hesitated, and seeing nothing in her eyes of any future hope for Harry, finished the sentence, with “and one or two others to sit by me and cheer me up; that's better than all the doctors in the world. And now, first about your father and then about yourself.”
“Oh, he's very well,” she rejoined absently. “He's off somewhere, went away two days ago. He'll be back in a week. But you must have something to eat—GOOD things!”—her mind still occupied with his condition. “I'm going to have some chicken broth made the moment I get home and it will be sent fresh every day: and you must eat every bit of it!”