All the same, her own face looked worried when she entered the sick room and looked down at Mr. Craig’s face on the pillows.
“It seems ridiculous for me to be lying here, Becky,” he would say to her, with the whimsical boyish smile she loved. “Why, there isn’t anything the matter with me only I’m tired out. Machinery’s out of whack is all.”
“No, nothing special only that you can’t eat or walk or sit up without keeling over.” Her keen hazel eyes were amused as she looked at him. “You know, Tom Craig, if it wasn’t for Margie, the girls, and Tommy, I’d take you straight home with me.”
He looked from her to the window. Jean had just brought in a bunch of daffodils in a slender glass vase and had set them in the sunlight.
“You’re not going soon, are you, Becky?”
Rebecca seated herself in the chair beside his bed. As she would have put it, there was a time for all things, and this seemed an opportune one for her to get something off her mind.
“I’ll have to pretty soon. It looks like an early spring, Tom, and there’s a heap of work waiting for me up there. Of course Matt knows how things go as well as I do, but I’ve been away over a month now, and I like to have the oversight of things. Men are only boys, after all, and you can’t expect too much from them. I want to get the barn shingled, and some more hen runs set out before the chicks begin to hatch, and all my berry patches need clearing out. You know that mass of blackberries along the stone wall in the clover patch below the lane—what’s the matter, Tom?” She glanced at him in alarm.
He had closed his eyes as if in pain, and his hand closed suddenly over her own as it lay on the blanket.
“It makes me homesick to hear you talk, Becky.”
Their glances met in a long look of sympathetic remembrance of the old days at Maple Grove.