“I won three agates and a chiny off Fatty Grover—like to froze my fingers too. We got down behind the coal house out of the wind, but it didn’t help much.”
“Thought Fatty darsent play keeps?”
“Well, I guess his dad’d lick him if he found out—s’pose he’d most have to, being the Minister—but Fatty’s game—he won’t blab. Aren’t they beauties?”
Ernest gave a little gesture of impatience and Sherm suddenly remembered the bandaged eyes.
“Oh, say, I didn’t go to——” he began penitently.
Mrs. Morton appeared opportunely at this moment with a plate of hot doughnuts, a little anxious lest the boys should fall to romping.
Poor Marian’s trouble began two weeks after Ernest’s and proved to be much more serious. She had sympathized deeply with the bookloving boy in his irksome confinement, and she had been more than faithful about coming over to read or talk to him. It was coming through a storm to keep her promise to him that proved her own undoing.
She had a hard cold already—March had been continuously raw and blustery. The last day of the month had brought with it the worst blizzard of the season. A cutting wind swept down from the north and the snow was icy hard and stinging. Marian watched the storm from her windows for some time before she could get up courage to venture out. But Mother Morton’s was only three blocks away and she knew Ernest would be doubly disappointed if she failed to come because of the dreary day. So she wrapped up warmly and braved the elements. The three blocks seemed a mile before she covered them. She had to fight every inch in the teeth of the wind and reached the gabled house thoroughly chilled and spent. A bad attack of pneumonia followed this exposure, and Ernest’s troubles were almost ignored in the anxiety about lovely Marian.
The crisis passed safely by dint of loving care and good nursing, but her convalescence was slow. Ernest’s eyes were well and he was back in school before Marian dared leave the house. It grieved them all to see her so thin and white.
Poor Ernest heard the story of her struggle with the blizzard for his sake repeated so many times, as sympathetic friends called upon his mother, that the boy began to feel a personal responsibility for her illness. He didn’t say anything but he hovered around her as soon as he was permitted to go out, spending every cent of his slender pin money in dainties and flowers which he seldom presented to her directly. He would leave them on her bed or on the dining-room table with never a word. Frank and Marian were pleased and touched by his devotion. They laughed together over his bashful ways without suspecting that the lad was worried.