The boy laughed. “I know that I wouldn’t be if I could help myself,” he said. “I’ve always wished that I had been born a wild Indian or a pirate or something interesting.”
Nan seated herself on a stump that would soon be covered with vines.
“I don’t wonder you are sick,” she said with renewed sympathy. “I would be smothered, I know, if I had to live all of the time in houses with so much velvet, and portieres shutting out the wind and the sun. Tell me what is your name?”
“I am Robert Widdemere,” he replied, and then a shadow crept into the eyes that for a moment had been gleaming with amusement as he added:
“I’m never going to be well again. The doctor does not know what is the matter with me; no one does, but I can’t eat, and so I might as well hurry up and die.”
The girl looked steadily at the lad for a moment and then she said, “Robert Widdermere, you ought to have more courage than that. Of course you’ll die if you’re just going to weakly give up. I don’t believe that you’re sick at all. I think you have been too much civilized. Now I’ll tell you what you do. Eat all you can, and get strong fast, and then we will ride horseback over the mountains and I’ll run you a race on the coast highway.”
“That would be great!” the boy exclaimed and again his eyes glowed with a new eagerness.
The girl sprang up. “Hark!” she said, “the old mission bells are telling that it is noon. I must go or Miss Dahlia will be waiting lunch.
“Good-bye, Robert Widdemere, I’ll come again.”
The lad watched the gleam of red disappearing through a gate in the hedge which he had pointed out. Then a new determination awakened in his heart. Perhaps it was cowardly to give up and die, just because he was so lonesome, so lonesome for the dad who had been the dearest pal a boy could ever have.