Angela. This courageous young lady of
Louie. Norway."
Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a music-hall star at Sydney.
What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a tenderness only surpassed by my nurse's. Was this not proved when I began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his sofa and staring out of the window?
I cannot say how long after Stevie's death it was before this want broke out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face, had power to comfort me.
I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to despatch little children thither—an ugly box, when wings would be so much prettier.
Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my sorrows and unfolded my ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me. Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up.
I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful shame.
I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing.