"I was sure—I was afraid that he was killed—like poor Tom. Isn't it dreadful that he should die? he was always so full of life." Then she began to weep silently, and said no more about Arthur.
Now it happened that Brenda passed through a more severe illness that summer than Arthur. Her physician, in anxious consultation with the family, concluded that she had stayed too long in town. "I think, too," he said, "that she has had something to worry her. It would seem," he added apologetically, "that one situated as she is would have no cares; but it is hard sometimes to account for the workings of a young girl's mind. She may have magnified some little anxiety until it played serious injury to her nerves."
"It is this war," responded Mrs. Barlow. "I wonder that more of us do not have nervous prostration."
During those long weeks Brenda herself had little to say, even when she was well enough to sit up. When she spent long hours under the awning on the little balcony on which her windows opened, she seemed to take but a languid interest in the world around her.
In those first two or three days when Brenda's condition was at its worst, when there was even a question whether or not she would get well, no one thought much about Maggie, the newcomer at Rockley, whose grief was greater than she could express. She kept her place in a corner of the piazza, hoping and hoping that some one would ask her to do something for the sick girl. Gladly would she have exchanged places with the trained nurse who went back and forth to the sick-room, had she not known that the nurse could do the things that she in her ignorance was unequal to. At last there came a day when Brenda herself asked for her, and after that Maggie was always in the sick-room, except on those occasions when she was carrying into effect some request of Brenda's. How thankful she felt for the lessons in invalid cookery, that now enabled her to prepare a tempting luncheon that Brenda would eat after she had petulantly refused the equally good luncheon prepared by the nurse. Then there were hours when no one but Maggie could amuse Brenda, when, after listening to a chapter or two from the book that she had asked Maggie to read, the sick girl would draw the other into conversation. Any one who listened would have found that the subject about which they talked was war and battles—especially the eventful day of the Santiago fight, concerning which Brenda would allow no one else to speak to her.
