It filled her with animation to see the people who came to the house and talk with them; and among these she made many passionately devoted friends.
There were also poor children from the families of laborers in the neighborhood, in whom she had always taken a warm interest. She now organized them into regular classes, and taught and amused them and told them stories, sang funny songs to them, and clothed and fed them with nice things, and they grew to her an immense hobby and constant occupation.
She also became a quite surprising performer on the banjo, which her father had taught her when she was quite a little girl, and invented charming tunes and effects and modulations that had never been tried on that humble instrument before. She could have made a handsome living out of it, crippled as she was.
She seemed the busiest, drollest, and most contented person in Marsfield; she all but consoled us for the dreadful thing that had happened to herself, and laughingly pitied us for pitying her.
So much for the teaching of Barty Josselin, whose books she knew by heart, and constantly read and reread.
And thus, in spite of all, the old, happy, resonant cheerfulness gradually found its way back to Marsfield, as though nothing had happened; and poor broken Marty, who had always been our idol, became our goddess, our prop and mainstay, the angel in the house, the person for every one to tell their troubles to—little or big—their jokes, their good stories; there was never a laugh like hers, so charged with keen appreciation of the humorous thing, the relish of which would come back to her again and again at any time—even in the middle of the night when she could not always sleep for her pain; and she would laugh anew.
Ida Scatcherd and I, with good Nurse Sparrow to help, wished to take her to Italy—to Egypt—but she would not leave Marsfield, unless it were to spend the winter months with all of us at Lancaster Gate, or the autumn in the Highlands or on the coast of Normandy.
And indeed neither Barty nor Leah nor the rest could
