“I promised readily, and at fourteen the possession of that secret seemed to make me more womanly than my sisters, as I redoubled my tenderness to the suffering girl.
“The invalid was twenty-one—a great age in our estimation—and I used to look up to her with veneration, gazing in her soft sweet face and wistful eyes, wondering why she was so ill, and what was the great sorrow that had come upon her like a blight upon one of the roses round our porch.
“Cousin Kate came to us in the spring, and the months flew by till it was the height of summer; and many and many a night had I turned my face to the wall, so that Lil should not know, and cried silently till my pillow was wet. For I knew so well that Kate was weaker, much weaker than when she came, a walk across the lawn to the old garden-seat in the shade being as much now as she could bear.
“‘Cousin Kate,’ I said, one day when we were alone, Lil and Cissy having rushed off to get some flowers, ‘couldn’t any doctor make you well?’
“She looked at me with a wild strange gaze which almost startled me, before she replied, and then in a way that made my heart beat she sobbed out—
“‘Only one—only one!’ and then as if to herself, in a low whisper, she added, ‘and before he can come I shall be dead—dead!’
“She did not know I heard her last words, and I sat chilled and frightened, gazing at her till my sisters came back, when, as we frequently did, we sat down about her; Lil got upon the seat, Cissy sat on the grass with her head against one of Kate’s hands, which hung listlessly from the corner where she leaned, and I threw myself on the grass at her feet, so as to look up in her gentle face, which had now become calm with its old weary look.
“‘Cousin Kate,’ said Lil, ‘tell us another story.’
“‘No, no,’ I said, ‘don’t ask; she isn’t so well to-day.’
“‘Yes,’ she said quietly, raising her head and looking at me, ‘I am better to-day.’