Lucinda came out, nearly an hour later, to find her sister sitting disconsolate by the fireless stove, shivering with the cold, and staring into vacancy.
She put her broad arm with maternal kindness around Jessica’s waist, and led her unresisting toward the door. “Never mind, sis,” she murmured, with clumsy sympathy. “Come in and play with Horace.”
Jessica, shuddering again with the chill, buried her face on her sister’s shoulder, and wept supinely. There was not an atom of courage remaining in her heart.
“You are low down and miserable,” pursued Lucinda, compassionately. “I’ll make you up some boneset tea. It’ll be lucky if you haven’t caught your death a-cold out here so long.” She had taken a shawl, which hung in the hallway, and wrapped it about her sister’s shoulders.
“I half wish I had,” sobbed Jessica. “There’s no fight left in me any more.”
“What’s the matter, anyway?”
“If I knew myself,” the girl groaned in answer, “perhaps I could do something; but I don’t. I can’t think, I can’t eat or sleep or work. O God! what is the matter with me?”