XVII.
“Lois”—Mrs. Goodno, standing in the doorway, drew her favorite close beside her—“look at the picture coming down the hall! Isn’t she beautiful?” There was a spontaneous and genuine admiration in her tone as she spoke.
A something indefinable, an atmosphere of loveliness, seemed to breathe from Margaret’s every motion as she came toward them. Her cheeks had a delicate flush, her glance was bright and roving, and her perfect lips were tremulous. Her look had a new mystery in it—a brooding tenderness, like the look of a young mother.
“All through the nurses’ lecture this morning,” said Lois, “I noticed her. When she smiled it made one want to smile, too!”
As Margaret reached them and greeted Mrs. Goodno, Lois joined her, and the two girls walked down the hall together to their room.
“Now,” said Lois, as she took a text-book from the drab-backed row on the low corner shelf, and assumed a judicial demeanor, “I’m morally certain that you haven’t studied your Weeks-Shaw this morning, and I’m going to quiz you.”
Margaret broke into a laugh. “Try it,” she said gayly. “You’re going to ask me to define health, and to show the difference between objective and subjective symptoms, and tell you what is a mulberry-tongue. Health is a perfect circulation of pure blood in a sound organism. How is that?”
“Good!” Lois, sitting down by the window, was laughing, too. “When the doctor quizzes you, you may not know it so well! Suppose you explain to me the theory of counter-irritants.”
Margaret swooped down upon her, and kneeling by her chair, put both hands over the page, looking up into her face. “Don’t!” she said. “What do I care for it all to-day! Oh, Lois! Lois!” she whispered in the hushed voice of a child about to tell a dear secret, “I am so happy! I am so happy that I can’t tell it! To think that I can watch him and nurse him, and take his temperature! I can help cure him and see him get better and better every day. When he talks, he pronounces queerly and his words get all jumbled up, and his sentences have no ends to them, but I love to hear it—I know what they are trying to say! He is so weak that I feel as if I were his mother. I know you’ve told Mrs. Goodno; haven’t you, dear? Somehow I knew it just now when she smiled at us! I don’t care if you did—not a bit—if she will only let me stay by him.”
Lois patted the bronzing gloss of the uplifted head. “I did tell her,” she said. “I thought I ought to—but she understands. Never fear about that.”