“No, dear; but Miss Radley sent over a note quite early to say he has got a bad, feverish cold (he got so wet yesterday—it’s a pity he didn’t come back with you), and we don’t know what it may turn to. So you must just take a holiday, for I’m due at the hospital supplies at ten, and shall be away all day.”
“What’s the matter with Major Denver?”
“I fear,” said her mother, anxiously watching the earnest, delicately tinted face upturned to hers, “I fear he is very badly wounded.”
“Oh!” said Easter, and she looked very grave.
“Be as happy as you can, my precious,” her mother called to her as she drove away. “I’ll get home as early as possible.”
That was a very long day for Easter.
For one thing, it rained all the morning; for another, her father had to go a long way off on business connected with special constables, and couldn’t take her; and Amelia, the usually cheerful housemaid, went about the house with red eyes and a perpetual sniff, because she had heard that morning she’d lost a cousin in the “big push on the Somme.”
Amelia was distinctly depressing.
Easter knitted a few rows of her scarf—the scarf that was always begun by her and finished by somebody else because she got tired of it. She found she was missing Chris far more poignantly than was at all pleasant.
After all, even if he didn’t always quite give in to her, he was good company; and Easter found herself remembering many kind things he had done. The chocolates he had always shared so generously, the apples so unequally divided always in her favor. Once when she fell off a wall and scratched her hands and tore her frock so badly, he hadn’t laughed, and he was so seldom rough in play, only when unbearably provoked. Easter was too honest not to admit that even at the time.